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The Life of the Mind: A Novel
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Published:
Random House Publishing Group 2021
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Description
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, The Atlantic, Electric Lit, Thrillist, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews • A witty, intelligent novel of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction—“the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
“[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage—not her mother, her best friend, or her therapists (Dorothy has two of them). She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother. So why does Dorothy feel like a failure?
 
The Life of the Mind is a book about endings—of youth, of ambition, of possibility, but also of the meaning that an inquiring mind can find in the mess of daily experience. Mordant and remorselessly wise, this jewel of a debut cuts incisively into life as we live it, and how we think of it.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
03/02/2021
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780593229903
ASIN:
B089S783LS
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Christine Smallwood. (2021). The Life of the Mind: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Christine Smallwood. 2021. The Life of the Mind: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group, 2021.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Christine Smallwood. The Life of the Mind: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group, 2021.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Mar 03, 2021 17:14:47
Date Updated:
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      • role: Author
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      • bioText: Christine Smallwood’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice. Her reviews, essays, and cultural reporting have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Bookforum, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She has also written the “New Books” column for Harper’s Magazine, where she is a contributing editor, and been an editor at The Nation. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, is a founding faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
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fullDescription
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, The Atlantic, Electric Lit, Thrillist, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews • A witty, intelligent novel of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction—“the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
“[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage—not her mother, her best friend, or her therapists (Dorothy has two of them). She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother. So why does Dorothy feel like a failure?
 
The Life of the Mind is a book about endings—of youth, of ambition, of possibility, but also of the meaning that an inquiring mind can find in the mess of daily experience. Mordant and remorselessly wise, this jewel of a debut cuts incisively into life as we live it, and how we think of it.
reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from January 11, 2021
        Literary critic Smallwood debuts with the brilliant story of a young academic powering through her existential dread. Dorothy languishes in “adjunct hell” at a university in New York City, teaching up to four literature and writing courses per semester (including a course she designed titled “Writing Apocalypse”), while her affable boyfriend helps pay the bills from her two therapists. Each fall, she holds out an ever-dwindling hope to land one of the several jobs that open up in her field. She’s just had a miscarriage, and as the weeks pass, she muses on the menstrual blood and tissue discharge that results from her at-home Cytotec treatment. Dorothy is an intensely cerebral creature. Her narration of interactions with others, whether exchanging text messages with a friend, giving money to a panhandler, or parrying with her peers, is filtered by literary analysis, often to hilarious effect (“This man is an albatross around my neck,” she thinks, after the panhandler she’d dubbed the “Ancient Mariner” follows her to another subway car). As she confronts her emotions about losing the unplanned pregnancy and reconsiders her ideas about endings, both literary and corporeal, she begins to reconnect with herself. Dorothy’s sharp, witty narration makes this book something special (“In the asymmetrical warfare of therapy, secrets were a guerrilla tactic,” she decides, after putting off a session with her primary therapist). The result is like the glorious love child of Otessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        February 15, 2021
        By day, Dorothy is an adjunct professor teaching undergrads in classes titled Writing Affect Theory and Writing Apocalypse. By daydream, Dorothy explains herself to children of the watery future, who live on rafts and are not impressed by her efforts to stop climate change (""You signed an online petition?""). This quietly funny, deeply interiorized debut novel from Harper's book critic Smallwood follows Dorothy in the days and weeks following a miscarriage. When she bleeds for longer than expected and gets an ultrasound to make sure everything's okay, her doctor is surprised by her request for a printed-out image of her emptying uterus. Outside of her partner, Rog, Dorothy doesn't share the loss: she doesn't tell her therapist, or her second therapist (who she sees to discuss the first therapist), or even her best friend. But she wonders plenty on the page, and remains in rich conversation with herself--sometimes pondering characters invented by Coleridge, Kafka, and Thomas Mann--on who or what controls a story, a meaning, an ending. Readers will find this perceptive, cerebral, original, and easy to fall into.

        COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from June 1, 2021
        The protagonist of Smallwood's debut novel endures the humiliations of life as a contingent faculty member. As the novel opens, Dorothy is on the toilet. She's in the midst of a miscarriage, and she has chosen to undergo this outside a hospital setting. As weeks go by, she tracks her continued bleeding, harboring this personal secret as she contends with her precarious position as a nontenured humanities Ph.D. She muses about cultural representations of the apocalypse--her current research interest--as she endures her own small apocalypse, and though she thinks and reads and writes ad nauseum about the global version, she suffers her own in silence, examining her bodily processes with mild interest. She even keeps her miscarriage from her two therapists--one of whom she has enlisted to help her work on her relationship with the other. At an academic conference in Las Vegas, she navigates the awkwardness of relationships within academia, whether it be with the adviser she will gladly abase herself to impress, a cohort member she once slept with, or a friendship with a strong undercurrent of competitiveness and jealousy. The novel's satirical edge--unflinching but never mean--lies in the stark contrast between the lofty ideas that constitute Dorothy's day-to-day professional existence and the private humiliations of the body, of being human, that she keeps to herself. She approaches every experience and emotion with all the hyperactive wit and self-reflexivity of a professional overthinker. Dorothy's interiority can be an exhausting place to reside, making the reading experience a bit claustrophobic at times--but that's precisely the point. Smallwood's talent for psychological acuity shines through here as she paints an achingly familiar portrait of someone who spends too much time in her own mind. All of this is buoyed by Smallwood's luminous prose, which heralds the arrival of a real talent. A Lucky Jim for the millennial woman; blistering, darkly comic, and splendidly written.

        COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, The Atlantic, Electric Lit, Thrillist, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews • A witty, intelligent novel of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction—“the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
“[A] jewel of a debut . . . abundantly satisfying.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with little hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her boyfriend knows that she’s just had a miscarriage—not her mother, her best friend, or her therapists (Dorothy has two of them). She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother. So why does Dorothy...
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