Overview

Jo is in a strange new country for university, and having a more peculiar time than most. A house with no walls, a roommate with no boundaries, and a home that seems ever more alive. Jo's sensitivity, and all her senses, become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, and dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh. This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval, presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.

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9781786633835

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Reviews

In PARADISE ROT, Jenny Hval creates a parallel world that's familiar but subtly skewed. As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder. - Chris Kraus Hval's words shock precisely because they're not referring to sex or desire but instead address vulnerability and nurturing... Hval's world is radically different: an intimate, often mysterious place where the melodic sophistication of Bjoerk and Kate Bush meets Laurie Anderson's witty cool. - Guardian As with all her work, she finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up. Pitchfork Norwegian artist Jenny Hval presents a version of female sexuality in which carnal impulses, anxieties and the female/male perspective are often knotted together. - Guardian Hval is an artist of many questions-the ones she asks, and those she provokes in the listener. `Apocalypse, girl' swerves from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It's not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval's beguiling voice. - New Yorker Contemporary pop culture teems with unfiltered first-person narratives and cathartic self-exposure, from search-engine-optimized `it happened to me' essays to the highbrow family memoirs of authors like Maggie Nelson. ... The avant-garde Norwegian singer Jenny Hval pulls off this feat with a rare grace, layering prose poems, both spoken and sung, over synths, pulsing house rhythms, and noise-rock fuzz. - Village Voice

In PARADISE ROT, Jenny Hval creates a parallel world that's familiar but subtly skewed. As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder. - Chris Kraus Hval is an expert at creating and sustaining atmospherics across genres, and Paradise Rot is no exception. Paradise Rot is an odd microcosm inside an ordinary world.... It is, in many ways, a novel about finding and then choosing a self; it also shows the pull of unexpected queer desire and the dismantling of boundaries that draw requires. But most of all, in the way that a microscope reveals an unsettling truth about the familiar (that it's teeming with life you never expected), Paradise Rot is hard to forget. - Niina Pollari, Pitchfork Hval's words shock precisely because they're not referring to sex or desire but instead address vulnerability and nurturing... Hval's world is radically different: an intimate, often mysterious place where the melodic sophistication of Bjoerk and Kate Bush meets Laurie Anderson's witty cool. - Guardian As with all her work, she finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up. Pitchfork Norwegian artist Jenny Hval presents a version of female sexuality in which carnal impulses, anxieties and the female/male perspective are often knotted together. - Guardian Hval is an artist of many questions-the ones she asks, and those she provokes in the listener. `Apocalypse, girl' swerves from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It's not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval's beguiling voice. - New Yorker Contemporary pop culture teems with unfiltered first-person narratives and cathartic self-exposure, from search-engine-optimized `it happened to me' essays to the highbrow family memoirs of authors like Maggie Nelson. ... The avant-garde Norwegian singer Jenny Hval pulls off this feat with a rare grace, layering prose poems, both spoken and sung, over synths, pulsing house rhythms, and noise-rock fuzz. - Village Voice Every page of Paradise Rot contains something in it that burrows deep inside you. Much like Hval's musical output, the book is almost uncomfortably intimate, the kind of penetrating encounter that will make you uncontrollably shudder as your body is plunged into the sensory world that Hval has created. It's an uncanny and yet deeply moving reading experience, one that Hval uses to explore the complexities of queer desire and human enmeshment in our physical surroundings. - Tanner Howard, Nylon Hval's surreal debut riffs on the same layered intricacies as her music, transcending simple categorisation to create a dreamy landscape both separate and a part of what we recognise as reality. - The Stinging Fly Hval's writing is hyper-sensual and poetic. - Autostraddle

In PARADISE ROT, Jenny Hval creates a parallel world that's familiar but subtly skewed. As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder. - Chris Kraus Hval is an expert at creating and sustaining atmospherics across genres, and Paradise Rot is no exception. Paradise Rot is an odd microcosm inside an ordinary world.... It is, in many ways, a novel about finding and then choosing a self; it also shows the pull of unexpected queer desire and the dismantling of boundaries that draw requires. But most of all, in the way that a microscope reveals an unsettling truth about the familiar (that it's teeming with life you never expected), Paradise Rot is hard to forget. - Niina Pollari, Pitchfork Hval's words shock precisely because they're not referring to sex or desire but instead address vulnerability and nurturing... Hval's world is radically different: an intimate, often mysterious place where the melodic sophistication of Bjoerk and Kate Bush meets Laurie Anderson's witty cool. - Guardian As with all her work, she finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up. Pitchfork Norwegian artist Jenny Hval presents a version of female sexuality in which carnal impulses, anxieties and the female/male perspective are often knotted together. - Guardian Hval is an artist of many questions-the ones she asks, and those she provokes in the listener. `Apocalypse, girl' swerves from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It's not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval's beguiling voice. - New Yorker Contemporary pop culture teems with unfiltered first-person narratives and cathartic self-exposure, from search-engine-optimized `it happened to me' essays to the highbrow family memoirs of authors like Maggie Nelson. ... The avant-garde Norwegian singer Jenny Hval pulls off this feat with a rare grace, layering prose poems, both spoken and sung, over synths, pulsing house rhythms, and noise-rock fuzz. - Village Voice Every page of Paradise Rot contains something in it that burrows deep inside you. Much like Hval's musical output, the book is almost uncomfortably intimate, the kind of penetrating encounter that will make you uncontrollably shudder as your body is plunged into the sensory world that Hval has created. It's an uncanny and yet deeply moving reading experience, one that Hval uses to explore the complexities of queer desire and human enmeshment in our physical surroundings. - Tanner Howard, Nylon Hval's surreal debut riffs on the same layered intricacies as her music, transcending simple categorisation to create a dreamy landscape both separate and a part of what we recognise as reality. - The Stinging Fly

Hval's words shock precisely because they're not referring to sex or desire but instead address vulnerability and nurturing... Hval's world is radically different: an intimate, often mysterious place where the melodic sophistication of Bjoerk and Kate Bush meets Laurie Anderson's witty cool. Guardian As with all her work, she finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up. Pitchfork Norwegian artist Jenny Hval presents a version of female sexuality in which carnal impulses, anxieties and the female/male perspective are often knotted together. Guardian Hval is an artist of many questions-the ones she asks, and those she provokes in the listener. `Apocalypse, girl' swerves from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It's not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval's beguiling voice. New Yorker Contemporary pop culture teems with unfiltered first-person narratives and cathartic self-exposure, from search-engine-optimized `it happened to me' essays to the highbrow family memoirs of authors like Maggie Nelson. ... The avant-garde Norwegian singer Jenny Hval pulls off this feat with a rare grace, layering prose poems, both spoken and sung, over synths, pulsing house rhythms, and noise-rock fuzz. Village Voice

Author Information

Norwegian musician and writer Jenny Hval has honed an intellectual and uncompromising view on politics and sexuality in her prose and in her records, which include 'Blood Bitch', Apocalypse, Girl' and 'Innocence is Kinky'. Paradise Rot is the first of her books to appear in English.

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