Michelle Obama’s memoir, Andrea Bartz’s boss-babe thriller, Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection, and more fantastic books that are finally available in our favorite format — no offense, hardcovers.
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For your reading list Credit: Penguin Art Group No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood The unnamed narrator of Patricia Lockwood’s first novel has found herself thrown into the public eye after a seemingly inane observation she posts online (“Can a dog be twins?”) goes viral. And thus in the first section of No One Is Talking About This, our narrator invites us into the mental whiplash of living a life that is now Extremely Online. She writes in quick sketches and streams of consciousness not much longer than tweets themselves, strung together in a style that resembles Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, as she touches on climate change, that one weird Folger’s commercial, and conspiracy theories about our sudden cultural obsession with butt stuff. In one of the novel’s many moments of startling self-awareness, Lockwood gives her explanation for the book’s form: “Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it.” In Lockwood’s attempt to capture what it feels like to be online, her fragmented observations build to a simultaneous ode to and indictment of the internet. It’s disorienting and often very, very funny.
But suddenly in its second act, the book becomes something else entirely. Without giving too much away, we move from our narrator encapsulating a collective consciousness to instead trying to make sense of a deeply personal family tragedy. While the first half of the novel is likely to be polarizing to readers in its fractured flashes, the novel in its entirety is something to marvel at as Lockwood adeptly tackles questions that seem too big to cover in 200 pages. How do we put words to the collectively felt nonsense of being online? How do we talk about the human condition, about grief, when words feel entirely inadequate? Can we create a new language and form to capture the spaces between being the digital and the real? It seems that Lockwood has found a way. Get your copy. —Jillian Karande
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