Dept. of Speculation (MP3 CD)

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Dept. of Speculation By Jenny Offill, Jenny Offill (Narrated by) Cover Image
By Jenny Offill, Jenny Offill (Narrated by)
$29.99
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Staff Reviews


A sparse and fragmentary work built of jokes, quotes, impressions, and confessions, "Dept. of Speculation" is held together by an unnamed female character barely holding it together. She is called “I” in the first first-person half, then “I” flits to “the wife” for the third-person last. The first-person is claustrophobic; “I” can’t see outside of herself. (Her: an upper middle class American urbanite, married with child, and a writer, like Offill, a decade-plus from her first and last published work.) “I” feels trapped, caught between a youthful dream of becoming an “art monster” (“road not taken,” her husband says) and the “swirl of hair on the back” of her new baby’s head. The domestic cliché is driven home when her husband does what husbands with self-defeating wives are wont to do in contemporary upper middle class American marriage narratives. Playful clichés open up space — we disidentify. With the switch to the third-person comes comic relief. In “the wife,” author Offill and we learn to laugh at "ourselves," at the idea of an "I".

— Fiona

In Department of Speculation, an unnamed narrator known simply as “the wife” contends with the inevitable frictions that arise between the domestic sphere and the demands of her art. Attempts to create are thwarted by the mundane; a faltering marriage, a colicky baby, an invasion of bedbugs. How to be both artist and person, Offill reminds us, remains an unanswered question unique to the female experience.

— Mariah

February 2014 Indie Next List


“I found myself gasping at the sheer beauty and conciseness of Offill's sentences in this portrait of a marriage. Dept. of Speculation can be devoured quickly, or readers can linger in it over many sittings. Covering the topics of love, loneliness, grief, joy, fidelity, beauty, depression, mania, motherhood, and writing, the shifting points of view are subtle yet profound, and despite the darkness and sadness of the story, when I closed the book I was left more alert and attentive, and feeling more alive. Highly recommended!”
— Janet Geddis, Avid Bookshop, Athens, GA

Description


""The Wife"" once exchanged love letters with her husband, coyly postmarked the Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - the arrival of a child and, later, a lover - the Wife puzzles over the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and romantic love. With mordant wit, the Wife analyzes her predicament, offering ferocious, wry, often devastating reflections on matrimony, motherhood, artistic ambition, and the condition of universal shipwreck that presents itself to so many of us at midlife.

About the Author


Jenny Offill is the author of the novel Last Things, which was chosen as a notable or best book of the year by The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The Guardian. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Book Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Story, Epoch, Boulevard, Significant Objects, and Electric Literature, among other places. Her children's books include 17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore and 11 Experiments That Failed. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and now teaches in the writing programs at Brooklyn College and Columbia University.
Product Details
ISBN: 9781629231877
ISBN-10: 1629231878
Publisher: Dreamscape Media
Publication Date: January 28th, 2014
Language: English