When Jenny Offill started writing her third novel,
Weather, in 2015, the concept of dread towards society, the world, your neighbor was, comparatively speaking, almost a novelty. Bad things were happening every day, to be certain. It s just that there were so many
other, non-society-threatening elements at play, too. Most of us didn t even know the term
doomscrolling, much less use it regularly to rehash our evenings. One could say, even, that Jenny Offill was a preeminent doomscroller.
The author, whose work includes the lauded 2014 novel
Dept. of Speculation, was halfway through
Weather when Donald Trump was elected, which caused the rest of the country to, essentially, get on her level. The singularly-named novel, which released in paperback this month, follows a New York librarian (Lizzie) as she grapples with stessors in her personal life (helping a recovering-addict brother, the raising of her young sons) and a quickly-expanding fascination with the climate cri
3 books on climate change for academics, dummies and deniers
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Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is an exercise in snark The debut novel of a celebrated millennial critic is scornful, cold and – even worse – boring.
Literary opinion-haver: Lauren Oyler’s reviews have appeared in the New Yorker and the LRB
Vice, the
New Yorker, the
London Review of Books and everywhere in-between. She is highly particular about the authors she doesn’t like (Sally Rooney) and the authors she really doesn’t like (Jia Tolentino). Oyler disdains fiction that’s described as “spare” and can’t abide the overuse of similes. She’s sick of books written in a fragmentary style and blames a significant number of bad novels on Master of Fine Arts writing programmes. She has no qualms about dropping plot spoilers and believes the elision between entertaining genre fiction and meaningful art in literary fiction is “concerning”. She has little patience with mainstream feminism and its “rampant false hatred towards men”.