Awards

• Short-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2020

Overview

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9780345806901

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Reviews

One of the Wall Street Journal Magazine's 10 must-read books this winter Lit Hub's 14 Books You Should Read in February Esquire.com's Best Books of 2020 AV Club's 5 New Books to Read in February, New York Times' 14 New Books to Watch in February, Thrillist's 21 Books We Can't wait to Read in 2020, Good Housekeeping's 20 Best Books of 2020, PureWow's 13 Books We Can't Wait to Read in February. Lit Hub - 14 Book You Should Read in February Vulture - 11 Notable New Releases Entertainment Weekly - 20 New Books to Read in February Hello Giggles - 11 Best New Books to Read in February Bustle - 22 Most Anticipated Books of February Brilliant... Offill's writing is brisk and comic, and her book's format underlines her gifts. Weather is her most soulful book... [Her] humor is saving humor; it's as if she's splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan. --The New York Times Jenny Offill is the master of novels told in sly, burnished fragments... In Offill's hands, the form becomes something new, a method of distilling experience into its brightest, most blazing forms -- atoms of intense feeling... these fragments feel like: teeming worlds suspended in white space, entire novels condensed into paragraphs... What she is doing is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself... Weather transforms the novel of consciousness into a record of climate grief. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times profile Time flies by in this wry story of a family--librarian Lizzie, her classics buff husband, their son, and her brother, a recovering addict. Apocalypse (climate and otherwise) looms over the narrative, and yet it is funny and hopeful too. --Vanity Fair We named Offill's previous novel, the shrewd and genre-destroying Dept. of Speculation, as a book every woman should read; this follow-up, a sort of spiritual sequel, solidifies the author's place among the vanguard of writers who are reinvigorating literature. --O The Oprah Magazine Compact and wholly contemporary, Jenny Offill's third novel sees a librarian find deep meaning and deep despair in her side gig as an armchair therapist for those in existential crisis, including liberals fearing climate apocalypse and conservatives fearing the demise of 'American values.' As she attempts to save everyone, our protagonist is driven to her limits, making for a canny, comic story about the power of human need. --Esquire Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible...utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence...luminous. --The Boston Globe Genius... [A] lapidary masterwork... Remarkable and resonant... The right novel for the end of the world. --The LA Times Another perfectly wonderful trip inside the mind of Jenny Offill... [Her] fiction is such a pleasure to read... the funniness of many of her sentences indicates how precisely she calibrates them. --Slate Ptent... Offill is a master of the glancing blow. --NPR.org Glorious, dizzying, disconcerting and often laugh-out-loud hysterical --USA Today Always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Clever and seductive . . . the weather of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor. Offill is good company for the end of the world. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Revelatory . . . Offill, who will delight fans of Lydia Davis and Joy Williams, performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from tipping into the abyss. --Booklist (starred review) This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy. --Ocean Vuong Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It's this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present. --Ben Lerner No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill. --Jia Tolentino Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes. --Sheila Heti Novelists don't need to dream the end of the world anymore--they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today's few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it's as if they are all cut from one diamond. --Jonathan Dee Weather is a beautiful book, both subtle and powerful. In writing, that's a superhuman feat. And now is exactly when we need the superhumans. Make haste. Read it. --Lydia Millet There is no doubt that Jenny Offill is the writer for this particular historical moment. Weather is a tour de force of her considerable and startling gifts: the compressed and gorgeous sentences, the astounding comic timing, the profound and wise surprises. The miracle of this novel is how it looks at our contradictions and conditions with such bracing honesty and yet gives us a tender hopefulness toward these fraught humans. Offill makes us feel implicated but also loved. --Dana Spiotta

One of the Wall Street Journal Magazine's 10 must-read books this winter Lit Hub's 14 Books You Should Read in February Esquire.com's Best Books of 2020 AV Club's 5 New Books to Read in February, New York Times' 14 New Books to Watch in February, Thrillist's 21 Books We Can't wait to Read in 2020, Good Housekeeping's 20 Best Books of 2020, PureWow's 13 Books We Can't Wait to Read in February. Lit Hub - 14 Book You Should Read in February Vulture - 11 Notable New Releases Entertainment Weekly - 20 New Books to Read in February Hello Giggles - 11 Best New Books to Read in February Bustle - 22 Most Anticipated Books of February Brilliant... Offill's writing is brisk and comic, and her book's format underlines her gifts. Weather is her most soulful book... [Her] humor is saving humor; it's as if she's splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan. --The New York Times Jenny Offill is the master of novels told in sly, burnished fragments... In Offill's hands, the form becomes something new, a method of distilling experience into its brightest, most blazing forms -- atoms of intense feeling... these fragments feel like: teeming worlds suspended in white space, entire novels condensed into paragraphs... What she is doing is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself... Weather transforms the novel of consciousness into a record of climate grief. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times profile Time flies by in this wry story of a family--librarian Lizzie, her classics buff husband, their son, and her brother, a recovering addict. Apocalypse (climate and otherwise) looms over the narrative, and yet it is funny and hopeful too. --Vanity Fair We named Offill's previous novel, the shrewd and genre-destroying Dept. of Speculation, as a book every woman should read; this follow-up, a sort of spiritual sequel, solidifies the author's place among the vanguard of writers who are reinvigorating literature. --O The Oprah Magazine Compact and wholly contemporary, Jenny Offill's third novel sees a librarian find deep meaning and deep despair in her side gig as an armchair therapist for those in existential crisis, including liberals fearing climate apocalypse and conservatives fearing the demise of 'American values.' As she attempts to save everyone, our protagonist is driven to her limits, making for a canny, comic story about the power of human need. --Esquire Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible...utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence...luminous. --The Boston Globe Genius... [A] lapidary masterwork... Remarkable and resonant... The right novel for the end of the world. --The LA Times Another perfectly wonderful trip inside the mind of Jenny Offill... [Her] fiction is such a pleasure to read... the funniness of many of her sentences indicates how precisely she calibrates them. --Slate Ptent... Offill is a master of the glancing blow. --NPR.org Glorious, dizzying, disconcerting and often laugh-out-loud hysterical --USA Today Always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Clever and seductive . . . the weather of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor. Offill is good company for the end of the world. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Revelatory . . . Offill, who will delight fans of Lydia Davis and Joy Williams, performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from tipping into the abyss. --Booklist (starred review) This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy. --Ocean Vuong Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It's this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present. --Ben Lerner No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill. --Jia Tolentino Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes. --Sheila Heti Novelists don't need to dream the end of the world anymore--they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today's few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it's as if they are all cut from one diamond. --Jonathan Dee Weather is a beautiful book, both subtle and powerful. In writing, that's a superhuman feat. And now is exactly when we need the superhumans. Make haste. Read it. --Lydia Millet There is no doubt that Jenny Offill is the writer for this particular historical moment. Weather is a tour de force of her considerable and startling gifts: the compressed and gorgeous sentences, the astounding comic timing, the profound and wise surprises. The miracle of this novel is how it looks at our contradictions and conditions with such bracing honesty and yet gives us a tender hopefulness toward these fraught humans. Offill makes us feel implicated but also loved. --Dana Spiotta

Genius. . . . Remarkable and resonant. . . . The right novel for the end of the world. --Los Angeles Times Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible. . . . Luminous. --The Boston Globe Brilliant. . . . Offill's writing is often brisk and comic, and her book's format underlines her gifts. . . . Weather is her most soulful book. . . . Offill's humor is saving humor; it's as if she's splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan. --The New York Times Book Review Darkly funny and urgent. . . . Offill is a master of the glancing blow. --NPR Jenny Offill is the master of novels told in sly, burnished fragments. . . . In Offill's hands, the form becomes something new . . . a method of distilling experience into its brightest, most blazing forms -- atoms of intense feeling. . . . These fragments feel like: teeming worlds suspended in white space, entire novels condensed into paragraphs. . . . What she is doing is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Weather holds its own with the strongest examples of the new non-speculative climate fiction. It has the feel of a classic, the kind of book that future humans will read in order to figure out what people were thinking in the early decades of the twenty-first century. --Los Angeles Review of Books Glorious, dizzying, disconcerting and often laugh-out-loud hysterical. --USA Today Time flies by in this wry story of a family--librarian Lizzie, her classics buff husband, their son, and her brother, a recovering addict. Apocalypse (climate and otherwise) looms over the narrative, and yet it is funny and hopeful too. --Vanity Fair [Weather] solidifies the author's place among the vanguard of writers who are reinvigorating literature. --O, The Oprah Magazine Compact and wholly contemporary, Jenny Offill's third novel sees a librarian find deep meaning and deep despair in her side gig as an armchair therapist for those in existential crisis. . . . A canny, comic story about the power of human need. --Esquire An eerily realistic reflection on what it feels like to exist in a bubble of nonstop information. --Time A beach read for those who like to worry about the beaches. . . . This is a pre-apocalyptic novel, and its subject is dread, not disaster. --The Nation Like a sort of literary shadow box, the novel collects images and instances from the past few years, with the 2016 election as a clarifying point in this picture of a fraught and fragmenting world. . . . One of the wonders of Offill's writing is that her light touch lets us glimpse the very real dread lurking underneath. --Minneapolis Star Tribune Offill has achieved the near impossible. She has made grappling with the climate crisis not only important and challenging -- but also, a tough assignment, entertaining. --The Toronto Star Another perfectly wonderful trip inside the mind of Jenny Offill. . . . [Her] fiction is such a pleasure to read. . . . The funniness of many of her sentences indicates how precisely she calibrates them. --Slate

Author Information

JENNY OFFILL is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award) and Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen-Faulkner Award, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low-residency program at Queens University.

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