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The Life of the Mind Christine Smallwood

The Life of the Mind By Christine Smallwood

The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood


£6.90
New RRP £12.99
Condition - Very Good
7 in stock

Summary

The glorious love child of Otessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney.

The Life of the Mind Summary

The Life of the Mind: Sharp and funny. (Daily Mail) by Christine Smallwood

***A TIME MAGAZINE, LITHUB, WHITE REVIEW BEST BOOK OF 2021***

200 pages of serious entertainment. The Times

The Life of the Mind opens with Dorothy sitting on a library toilet, checking her phone and examining the thick, curdled knots of string coming out of her body. No one but her boyfriend knows that she's had a miscarriage, not even her therapists-Dorothy has two of them.

An adjunct professor of English in New York City with no hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy's stuck, unable to envision the future or cut ties with the past. What did you call it, she asks herself, when a life stopped developing, but it didn't end?

Christine Smallwood's debut is a campus novel like no other. Piercingly intelligent and darkly hilarious, it moves from a classroom to an underwater puppet show, from a conference in Las Vegas to a karaoke party. It is a discomforting glimpse into the head of a brilliant woman on the edge, it is a novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies.

The Life of the Mind Reviews

A jewel of a debut... abundantly satisfying.

* Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror *

Brilliant and pleasurable, funny and dark, cerebral and visceral-a must-read for the bleeding human survivors of the modern age.

* Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed *

Crisp and assured.

* London Review of Books *

Brilliant... Dorothy's sharp, witty narration makes this book something special. The result is like the glorious love child of Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney.

* Publishers' Weekly *

Hilarious, recognizable, and helplessly wise..

* Rivka Galchen *

That rare thing: an intellectual page-turner that commands one's attention completely from the first sentence to the final line. In painfully funny prose, Smallwood's X-ray gaze seeks out the rich seams of anxiety and loneliness running just below the surface of our culture's exhausting performative enthusiasm, taking in everything from the complex social politics of karaoke to the head-spinning paradoxes of an academic conference in Las Vegas... Essential reading for our troubling times.

* Andrew Martin *

A wonderful novel about a life (and a mind) that refuses to behave novelistically. The book is smart, sharp, often very funny, and, in its commitment to truth over beauty, absolutely fearless.

* Christopher Beha *

About Christine Smallwood

As a critic, Christine Smallwood is known for her hilarious pieces about Britney Spears, Stephanie Meyer and Werner Herzog. She has written for The New York Times, the New Yorker and Harper's. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and N+1.

Additional information

GOR011948134
9781787703452
1787703452
The Life of the Mind: Sharp and funny. (Daily Mail) by Christine Smallwood
Used - Very Good
Paperback
Europa Editions (UK) Ltd
20211014
240
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - The Life of the Mind