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Product Info
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Author: Patricia Lockwood
ISBN: 9780593189597
Fiction, Humor
No One Is Talking About This
by
Patricia Lockwood
No One Is Talking About This by
Patricia Lockwood
Reviews
"[ No One Is Talking About This] it is an arch descendant of Austen's socio-literary style . . . [Lockwood] writes brilliantly and bitingly--the temptation is just to keep on quoting her."
New York Times Book Review
Summary
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?"
Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.
Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.
FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE & A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK
