In glittering prose, Popkey illuminates the performative nature of storytelling, assessing the degree to which the stories we tell about our lives are fictions.” “Formally adventurous and blisteringly current, this debut novel spanning almost two decades of conversations between women wrestles with the stories women tell about desire, friendship, and violence, among other subjects. Our guess is that this book will be the topic of many conversations in 2020.” “Each of the chapters in this exacting, exhilarating debut novel records a deeply intimate discussion the capricious, now-38-year-old narrator has had over nearly two decades with friends, maternal figures, and later, fellow single mothers. “Masterfully controlled, delightfully chilly” The slim book is smart and raw, and Popkey dives head-on into difficult, well - how else to say it? - topics of conversation.” “Popkey’s lyrical debut novel reads like a series of short stories: Over the span of 20 years, an unnamed narrator has conversations with an eclectic set of women - conversations about shame and love, sexuality and power. Shrewd and sensual, Popkey's debut carries the scintillating charge of a long-overdue girls' night." "As she explores her own history through a shifting lens of female rivalries and friendships, the book's surface coolness begins to peel away, revealing the raw, uncommon nerve of a radically honest storyteller." a shrewd record of the act of unflinchingly circling these amorphous notions of pain, desire and control." Her manner of parceling out information evoke at times the fragmentary and diaristic sensibilities of Jenny Offill's "Dept. Popkey's sentences careen breathlessly as her halting, staccato prose mirrors the "churning" within the narrator's mind. One of Time, The Washington Post, Hello Giggles, Apartment Therapy, Real Simple, and Entertainment Weekly's Most Anticipated books of 2020 Edgy, wry, and written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism, this novel introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist. In exchanges about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage, Popkey touches upon desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, and guilt. “Shrewd and sensual, Popkey's debut carries the scintillating charge of a long-overdue girls' night." - O, The Oprah MagazineĪ Best Book of the Year by TIME, Esquire, Real Simple, Marie Claire, Glamor, Bustle, and moreĬomposed almost exclusively of conversations between women-the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves- Topics of Conversation careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life. Afton Montgomery, Adult Frontlist BuyerĪ compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction, perfect for fans of Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill. This book doesn’t have any answers, but it has an awful lot of all the right questions. She has stream-of-consciousness style back-and-forths inside her own head that unfurl all the ways that the world we live in creates a chasm in its women between wanting to take all of our power back and wanting to give up control completely and hand the reins to someone, anyone else. Although Popkey focuses on the ways that women express their desires and pain to each other, she occasionally veers off into other types of interaction: the narrator roleplays with a man she picked up in a hotel bar, coaching him to become a character she could hate more than any other. Mostly, these are conversations amongst women-a group of mothers in Fresno getting wine drunk while their babies sleep in the next room, divulging how they wound up single and pregnant a family trip to Italy that falls into a sensual interaction between the narrator and her friend’s mother a near-evil back and forth between the narrator and a friend who treats her terribly as they walk through an art exhibit on female pain, inspired by the real work of artist Sophie Calle. This small but mighty debut from Miranda Popkey is told over the course of 20 years in the conversations that one unnamed narrator has.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |