of Speculation – the underdog persona's not going to fly any more'. ' 'Speculation' Shows Good Stories Come In Small Packages, Too'.

^ a b Wolitzer, Meg (23 January 2014).

'How Much Could Be Left Unsaid: An Interview with Jenny Offill'. ^ a b 'In Fragments Of A Marriage, Familiar Themes Get Experimental'.Influence Ī passage in the novel influenced Rachel Yoder's novel Nightbitch. The novel was included on the New York Times' list of the best books of 2014. of Speculation was shortlisted for 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Folio Prize. Offill has said she did not anticipate the book's success. In her review of the book, published by NPR, Meg Wolitzer praised the novel as ' intriguing, beautifully written, sly and often profound'.

The novel has been compared to Renata Adler's 1976 book Speedboat. Reception Critical reception Īccording to literary review aggregator Book Marks, the book received mostly 'Rave' and reviews, with some less positive reception. of Speculation eschews a typical plot, which Offill has said was deliberate. of Speculation ' came from the ashes of another book'. Though not purely autobiographical, the novel draws from Offill's life. The novel received positive reviews, and has been compared to Offill's later work, Weather.

of Speculation is a 2014 novel by American author Jenny Offill. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.Dept. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply 'the wife,' once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept.

It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage.

Department of speculation