SELECTED FOR THE FENCE MODERN PRIZE IN PROSE
A debut novel by a white millennial woman eviscerates the industries which produce her freedoms and responsibilities. She removes herself through processes of acquisition and elimination.
Valerie is an art worker in the big city, a product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, in the ways she can acquire and be acquired. She lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself. Watch Valerie learn to love and accumulate meaning as she relates to the art she compliantly sells and the man with whom she steals things.
In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, the consumption and reflectivity of a white American young-womanhood
lived in a phenomenological endzone comes delicately to life out of the sharp particulars thefted and loved in this urbane, semi-psychedelic
bildungsroman.
*. Chris Kraus * Ben Lerner* Lynne Tillman* Joan Didion* Ottessa Moshfegh* Tao Lin* Wayne Kostenbaum* Alexandra Kleeman* Maggie Nelson *. Kate Zambreno * Elif Batuman
