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Dept. of Speculation

Jenny Offill (Goodreads Author)

3.75 · Rating details · 43,951 ratings · 5,714 reviews

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

Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all ...more

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Hardcover, 179 pages

Published January 28th 2014 by Knopf

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Lists with This Book

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

2015 Tournament of Books Long List

72 books — 160 voters

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

2015 Tournament of Books Short List

17 books — 165 voters

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Average rating 3.75 ·

Rating details

· 43,951 ratings · 5,714 reviews

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May 21, 2013 Cameron rated it it was amazing

Shelves: double-recommended-crazy-good

I underlined basically the entire novel.

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Mar 30, 2014 Emma Sea rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourite, auckland-library, not-mm

6 stars.

I'm doing my inarticulate book-clutching thing. ...more

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Apr 15, 2015 s.penkevich rated it liked it

Shelves: relationships, road_map_of_life

‘If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.’

John Berryman once wrote ‘let all flowers wither like a party.’ Nothing lasts, even the things we love most and nurture and care for must pass, but this is not cause for sadness but merely a reason to look into each moment and let ourselves feel the emotion coursing through them. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, writer of the marvelous children’s book (and staple of my daughter’s bedtime routine) Spark ...more

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Jul 22, 2019 Swaroop Kanti rated it liked it · review of another edition

"But what if I`m special? What if I`m in the minority?"

As stated in the blurb I did not find this book to be a "portrait of marriage", but instead it was more like being in someone's mind (and heart) and getting an unfiltered, raw and original account of everything being thought of!

Each chapter, in fact even most of the paragraphs within the chapters, in Dept. of Speculation are unrelated and kind of disjointed. And, this way of narration made this book interesting!

In some, God is portrayed a

...more

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Sep 20, 2014 Stephen rated it did not like it

Shelves: fiction

The subject of this book is the same as Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment - the husband strays - yet the writing couldn't have been handled more differently.

To write like Ferrante you need a grasp of literature.
To write like Offill you need an American education and access to the internet.

Ferrante wears her education lightly - there are little, if any references to great writers.
Offill doesn't let you forget who she's in touch with.

Offill talks a lot about art.
Ferrante asks you to judge ...more

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Aug 06, 2016 Katie rated it really liked it

Shelves: published-2014

Essentially, Offill carries out a kind of emotional autopsy on a young woman trying to divide her energies between bringing up a young child and keeping a husband happy without sacrificing her commitment to succeeding as a writer.

The original format of this novel – it’s written as a kind of literary scrapbook of musings, quotes and insights - reminded me at times of Fellini’s brilliant film about the fount of inspiration, 8 ½. Like the film director in Fellini’s film, Offill’s writer is bereft ...more

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Feb 04, 2015 Idarah rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

Indulging in my love of audio books has become more challenging since I quit my job, and no longer have a two and a half hour commute to get lost in a dreamy book. I've taken to having a special ME day once a week. The ritual revolves around my complicated and needy hair. The process of pre-shampooing, washing, deep conditioning, detangling, and finally braiding my hair into tiny segments occupies about 3-4 hours sometimes. I used to put it off until I absolutely had a knotted mess on my hands. ...more

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Jan 05, 2014 Greg rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction, reviewed, girls-girls-girls

“She thinks before she acts. Or more properly she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw not a virtue.”

Dept. Of Speculation is a short novel of a marriage. It's told in 46 chapters composed of short paragraphs and almost aphoristic lines and quotes in 160 compact pages. The narrator, the Wife, goes from being a young woman who considers being an Art Monster, a person who lives solely for the creation of their art, to a wife and a mother. It's set mostly in Brooklyn, but that shouldn't be held ...more

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Jun 09, 2016 Roger Brunyate rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sui-generis, top-reviews, women

Ten Reasons Why You Should Read This Extraordinary Book

10. Because it has one of the coolest back-cover endorsements (by Michael Cunningham) you will ever see.

9. Because by reading you will challenge this 1896 advice to wives, quoted in the book:

The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart, it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt f

...more

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Sep 05, 2015 Paul Bryant rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

There are so many novels which are really memoirs but are given to us as novels because memoirs are like “oh, what makes you think your life is so interesting I might want to read about it?” and novels are “yay! A new novel!”

I will bet one thousand of my British pounds

that Jenny Offill really did have a bug infestation in her apartment and really did have a daughter who broke both her wrists. (Novels I read recently which are really also memoirs are : A Question of Upbringing, The Wallcreeper, T ...more

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Mar 04, 2014 Carol rated it did not like it

The plot depiction is disjointed and resembles the ramblings of a bi-polar patient off his/her meds. Typically it sounds like the ramblings of a person in couples' therapy when only one partner shows up. I would like to talk about the redeeming graces of this novelette, but I could find none, It was like picking up someone's private daily journal -- and finding that it's really only meaningful to the person writing it. Unfortunately, this material just did not engage me. (The text that explains ...more

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Jul 19, 2015 ·Karen· rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: everyone who is sick of hearing about "Elena Ferrante"

Shelves: f2f-book-group-reads, favourites, usa, best-of-2015

There are blowsy baroque behemoths that spill the entire contents of the fridge onto your reading table (and let you do the cooking, and the clearing up afterwards too sometimes), and then there are the delicate offerings, the distilled essence from the alembic, an extract that carries, within a tiny drop, sweetness, tartness, acidity, all at once. Potent. Searing. Jewel-like droplets that set the mouth ablaze and the mind reeling.

This is sensational.

Offill dispenses with all the conventional tr ...more

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Jan 03, 2015 christa rated it really liked it

True confession: I will probably never press a copy of Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” into anyone’s hot little hands. It doesn’t matter anyway. The thing landed on, like, every Best Of 2014 list in the universe, probably even half-assedly scribbled onto fast food napkins. But here’s the thing: I didn’t just love this book, I fucking loved it. I felt passionate and heart-beaty about it. I touched words on pages and sighed like they were images in a yearbook or whatever. I turned my copy in True confession: I will probably never press a copy of Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” into anyone’s hot little hands. It doesn’t matter anyway. The thing landed on, like, every Best Of 2014 list in the universe, probably even half-assedly scribbled onto fast food napkins. But here’s the thing: I didn’t just love this book, I fucking loved it. I felt passionate and heart-beaty about it. I touched words on pages and sighed like they were images in a yearbook or whatever. I turned my copy into origami, what with all the dog-earing. I thought these out-of-character words so many times:

“This book is absolutely gorgeous.”

Here’s the thing with book recs: Sometimes you read something and it’s great and you just generically tell your readerly-inclined friends (or internet cruisers) that it’s got your seal. Sometimes you read something and you think, “Oh my. Know who’d love this?” And you try to explain to said person that it’s crucial they read this book, like, yesterday, all while remembering that you really, seriously, freaking hate when someone tells you to read a certain book (unless they are on a preapproved list of people who understand how and what and why you read).

Here’s the gist of “Dept. of Speculation”: A woman living in Brooklyn meets a man who makes soundscapes and falls in love and they get married and make a baby. It all goes against this sort of master plan she had to become an Art Monster -- a rarity for women, she notes, but she would be a person who only thinks about art and is never burdened by the mundane. Nabakov, she points out, didn’t even fold his own umbrella.

TThere is a breach in the relationship. The man gets into it with another woman and the narrator spends a lot of time in this weird limbo of trying to figure out the status of her family. Is he in, is he out and all that.

But the story is written in these really super short paragraphs, just scraps of barely vignettes, that give just enough details to what is happening. In between are fun facts about Buddhist teachings and interactions with her sister or her friend a philosopher or memories. This is, style-wise, brilliant. The writing is super concise and the words feel like they’re more honest, worth more emotional weight. There is all this white space where who-knows-what is happening and it’s, as I’ve said, so gorgeous.

I actually had this thought while reading Offill’s book, which is like this wide-open ticking wound of a story. “I can’t recommend this to anyone because they wouldn’t appreciate it because they are not me.” (If *that* doesn’t make me sound like I carry a selfie stick …)

I’ve come through the romantic fog. I know this wasn’t written for me. But the way she writes about her baby feels so intensely personal -- in this way that those conversational “What to Expect” books promise to be, but aren’t -- that I actually felt a little embarrassed because these are my secrets.

“I remember the first time I said the word to a stranger. ‘It’s for my daughter,’ I said. My heart was beating too fast, as if I might be arrested.”

And this:

“I would give up everything for her, everything, the hours alone, the radiant book, the postage stamp in my likeness, but only if she would consent to lie quietly with me until she is eighteen. If she would lie quietly with me, if I could bury my face in her hair, yes, then yes, uncle.”

Or there were lines like this:

“The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out” which I wanted to needlepoint onto a throw pillow. ...more

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Apr 23, 2014 Tim added it

When I first pulled a copy of Renata Adler's Pitch Dark off the dollar remainder shelves at the Strand sometime in the early 90s, I was intrigued, mystified. ¿Que es esto? I was slaloming between the poles of philosophy and literature at the time and trying to get them to merge in some elegant way or at least not crash into a tree. I was grabbed there on 12th Street by how she alluded to Wittgenstein and Nabokov back-to-back, insisting that they belonged together, not to mention Scheherazade and When I first pulled a copy of Renata Adler's Pitch Dark off the dollar remainder shelves at the Strand sometime in the early 90s, I was intrigued, mystified. ¿Que es esto? I was slaloming between the poles of philosophy and literature at the time and trying to get them to merge in some elegant way or at least not crash into a tree. I was grabbed there on 12th Street by how she alluded to Wittgenstein and Nabokov back-to-back, insisting that they belonged together, not to mention Scheherazade and a trapped raccoon and an affair which we see in the shadows and the wings and hear in echoes and stubborn silences. It was the first time I'd noticed a deckled edge on a book, and it seemed fitting for a thing that seemed to want to feel unpolished and shun smoothness of any sort. I went on to write my thesis on Wittgenstein and Adler, jazz improvisation and storytelling, symmetries made and broken, and other stuff that I can't remember anymore. Adler's book blew me away because it felt--in language and form alike--stripped down, yanked inside-out, exposed, nervy and raw. The words were like a row of naked defenders at a penalty kick that never quite happens, an ongoing state of uneasy vigilance itself the goal.

I bring this up now partly because Offill's writing recalls Adler's work, now celebrated (she's taken a Lazarus-like turn off the remainder shelf) in both form and tone, or maybe the better word is "pulse." Others have pointed out the connection, most notably Roxane Gay, who describes Offill's latest novel in the NYTimes Book Review as, "at times, reminiscent of Renata Adler’s 'Speedboat' with a less bitter edge." No question, Dept. of Speculation shares that quality of leaping from observation to observation, from memory to scholarly citation, anecdote to meta-anecdote, teeming with musings on marriage and motherhood, teaching, getting from point A to G, and the quiet, often hidden slapstick that can accompany each of these. There are fewer non-sequiturs in Offill, fewer head-scratching moments; she's quite easy to follow. I'm partial--pun intended, I suppose--to this form, which seems to be a counterweight to our longing for continuity. For doesn't a long, thick novel, broken only at the chapter-joints, promise us that we can sink in and immerse ourselves, that it will envelope us wholly (I'm thinking about you, two out of the three Pulitzer fiction finalists this year)? And I'll admit, I'm hardly immune to the allure of being swept away like that by the high tide in an ocean of prose.

But reading Offill reminds me of the pleasures of the staccato, the skittery, the odd and end, the pond and the puddle. Of course, the tradition of the fragment goes back long before Adler, and as a literary and epistemological phenomenon has been lauded by people like David Shields--even had its moment on the Colbert Report. The form goes back to Heraclitus at least, and his love of tension and contradiction are evident throughout Speculation, though Offill also names a bunch of other early philosophers, from Thales to the Stoics, rather than planting a stake firmly in one patch of philosophical ground. To borrow Zadie Smith's metaphor of literature as a "big tent," Offill's tent is small but somehow roomy, and bustling with entertaining company.

I'd say the book succeeds as well as it does by altering our sense of proportion, as we acclimate to its rhythms, its spaces and gaps, its refusal to step back too much and take in any grand view. There are real facts and pseudo-facts, definitions and redefinitions, jokes and inverted jokes, lists and indices, scientific précis and sampled lyrics and imagined conversations and confessions. Together these make their own tides. One of the most powerful strands in the book is that of outer space, and in particular of the Voyager missions, including the "Golden Record" of sounds assembled by Sagan and Co. to showcase humanity in all its (non-sexual and non-violent) glory to some alien version of eyes and ears. Apart from going behind the scenes and delving into the private lives and romantic entanglements of the scientists behind Voyager, reminding us how human they were all along, Offill aptly describes these missions as "messages in a bottle, but thrown into outer space rather than the ocean." As she points out, one will pass within 1.7 light-years of the red dwarf Ross 248 in a mere 40,000 years. What, in other words, could be more fragmentary than flinging this splinter of humanity into the void; yet, too, what could be more grand and tinged with hope?
...more

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Jul 18, 2017 Hugh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2017, modern-lit

This is an intriguing book, but quite a difficult one to assess and review. At first it seemed like an almost random stream of disconnected short paragraphs, but it soon becomes clear that the book has a core narrative that tells what would otherwise be a fairly humdrum and universal story of a failing marriage. The plot is the least important thing in this book - it is full of memorable observations and thoughts on a wide variety of subjects.

It falls loosely into two halves - the first is told ...more

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Jun 25, 2013 Melanie rated it liked it

My rating oscillates between 3 and 4 stars.
Thin slices of married life as viewed through a microscope, agitated cells of a wife's emotional life swirling on the page. A mix of memories and inner thoughts, striking moments and philosophical quotes, the whole should have risen as a symphony yet it didn't quite do that in the end for me. The book felt a little bit rushed and disjointed and coming apart at the seams.
Jenny Offill jumped ahead through the years a little abruptly at times and I often ...more

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Jan 03, 2015 Jenna rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorite-reads-of-2015, favorite-novels-of-all-time, 2015-reading-challenge, reviewed, depression-and-mental-health, parents, made-me-cry

I want to review this book for a number of reasons, partly because it's so small and slight that I fear readers will ignore it. But, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, its resemblance to a modest pamphlet belies the size of its punch.

This book is an excellent character study and an example of what greatness can be achieved when an author trusts her reader and thus avoids the sin of overwriting.

These days, many movies seem longer and sloppier and less craftily edited to me. Likewise, it seems lik I want to review this book for a number of reasons, partly because it's so small and slight that I fear readers will ignore it. But, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, its resemblance to a modest pamphlet belies the size of its punch.

This book is an excellent character study and an example of what greatness can be achieved when an author trusts her reader and thus avoids the sin of overwriting.

These days, many movies seem longer and sloppier and less craftily edited to me. Likewise, it seems like I'm reading more and more books where the author has misinterpreted "show, don't tell" to mean "tell them everything, down to the most miniscule detail." For example, in another recent, divisive, quasi-experimental book about women's depression, Hausfrau, the author's determination and need to drive home her precious, weighty, portentous themes generated writing that, to my mind, seemed incredibly overwrought and pretentious and mechanical. To me, the prose read as though the author had hooked up an iPhone to protagonist Anna's brain and we were listening to Siri droning an interminable stream of repetitive thoughts in a dreadful computer-facilitated translation from another language.

In contrast - Dept. Of Speculation is a very spare book whose concise prose attempts to capture the very human, fleeting thoughts of the troubled protagonist.

Admittedly, I'm a sucker for books - from Virginia Woolf's to Zadie Smith's - that try to capture the imagistic, non-chronological way people actually think. So, without excruciatingly spelling it all out for us, author Jenny Offill helps us understand that Dept. Of Speculation's narrator-protagonist, "the Wife," is a thwarted artist who has made sacrifices in her career in order to assume the demands of marriage and motherhood. It's implied that she's dealt with some past postnatal depression, and that although she desperately loves her young daughter, her depression lingers because the personal and vocational sacrifices she's made for her family's wellbeing have, unfortunately, failed to yield a secure and happy home as hoped.

We get sketches of the family's trials, some as minute as a bedbug and some as monumental as an affair. We can infer that the protagonist may occasionally be a little bit of a difficult and anxious and self-loathing person - but no more than all of us. It's illustrated that the protagonist is intensely creative and intelligent, emotional and frustrated, and these themes are cleverly conveyed to us through the manner in which the Wife interweaves her personal musings and reflections with ideas from the scientific materials she's writing and editing. (Having abandoned her dreams of becoming an "Art Monster," she's now paying the family bills by taking on technical writing jobs, ranging from fact-checker of Ranger Rick-type children's science curricula to ghostwriter of a memoir by an eccentric, space-exploration-obsessed, Branson-esque millionaire.) It's like these dry scientific facts with which she spends her days become both fodder and outlet for her repressed and agonized artistic mind: like the tasks of daily (mom, married, household) life itself, the facts are both incredibly trivial and yet weighted with universal import. It's a great delivery system to invite, and require, the reader's interpretive skills and show, rather than tell, a story - so much better than being repeatedly informed, a la Hausfrau, exactly what someone is thinking and feeling and just being forced to accept it wholesale.

In other words, this is a TRUE character study. Because, it's insufficient, perhaps even cheating, but at very least disingenuous, to write a book that takes place entirely in the narrator/protagonist brain and call it a character study: That's just narrative point of view, not artistic or literary achievement. In a real character study, like this one, a reader is given tools and clues to develop her own earned understanding of a truly realistic, dynamic, evolving, and complex character. It's notable that Dept. of Speculation, using only one tiny little fraction of the page count of Hausfrau, provides a very rich sense of who the Wife is now, why she feels what she feels and does what she does, what she was like long ago, how and why she changed and ended up at this point, and in what direction she might go, or not go, next. (And I actually didn't get ANY of this successfully from Hausfrau, not even in the extra pages.) Plus, in Dept. of Speculation, I was still able to connect my own thoughts and dots -- they weren't just laid out for me, like railroad ties... -- and thus, it was an immensely more rewarding, challenging read for me, and one that left a pretty deep and lasting impression. ...more

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May 10, 2014 LeeAnne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-fic

This short story reminds me of the first big hill on a wooden roller coaster. That ominous,“click-click-clack... click-click -clack” as the chain slowly pulls the cars up the steep hill. The suspense builds, but be prepared for that fast, drop, straight down.

The main characters have no names; they are only referred to as The Husband and The Wife. A woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown as her marriage is imploding. Her story is told in rapid-fire, quick-cut scenes. This gives the reader sma This short story reminds me of the first big hill on a wooden roller coaster. That ominous,“click-click-clack... click-click -clack” as the chain slowly pulls the cars up the steep hill. The suspense builds, but be prepared for that fast, drop, straight down.

The main characters have no names; they are only referred to as The Husband and The Wife. A woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown as her marriage is imploding. Her story is told in rapid-fire, quick-cut scenes. This gives the reader small, fragmented but intimate glimpses into the couple’s relationship at critical points in time.

The author perfectly describes that feeling of terror from a woman who has given up her identity to become a mom and wife. She is left wondering, “What on earth have I done to my life?”

There is some cutting humor too:

  “And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' 
Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.”

Personal and intimate. Thumbs up. ...more

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Jan 19, 2017 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I wrote a review a couple of years ago...
sorry --not sure where it is
Might show up Mariah!!

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Dec 30, 2014 Barry Pierce rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-century, read-in-2014

Very nice, subtle novel. The prose is clear, stripped-back and easy to follow, it's very incidental and smooth. I don't know, reading this novel feels like that moment when you slip into a hot bath and suddenly everything is alright. The words swash around you with their calming violence, constantly bobbling and trickling along with their nonchalant rhythm. This is a wonderful piece. I'm saddend that more people haven't read this. I truly recommend it. ...more

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Oct 27, 2020 Jean-Luke rated it liked it

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets something like Tully meets a Modern Love essay in The New York Times. We are so used to seeing our own lives and the lives of others as stories with a beginning and an ending, but a series of fragments and random thoughts with many beginnings and many endings is far more accurate. Not that there isn't a story here--it's simply presented like one of those fancy deconstructed desserts, and I found it refreshing given the low page count. Had it been a 300 ...more

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Mar 05, 2015 Ben Loory rated it liked it

the writing is excellent, but the story (marriage/baby/infidelity/unpleasantness) just makes me wanna open myself with a sword

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Feb 07, 2014 Cher rated it did not like it

Shelves: abandoned-dnf

1 star - I really hated it.

DNF'd at 10% (a whopping 15 minutes of reading, maybe). Turns out it is a collection of random gibberish. Here are two excerpts that speak for themselves:

To live in a city is to be forever flinching. The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.
Blue jays spend every Friday with the devil, the old lady at the park told me.
“You need to get o ...more

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Jan 02, 2015 Glenn Sumi rated it really liked it

An unnamed Brooklyn writer and teacher meets a man, has a child with him and then discovers he’s cheating on her.

Sounds familiar, right? What makes this slim novel so memorable is the way the story unfolds in a series of vignettes that can be anything from a quote from a poem to an odd historical fact to haiku-like observations about life. Reading the book takes work. Images recur, characters known by their titles (“the philosopher,” “the almost astronaut”) come and go, and we’re left to connect ...more

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Jul 03, 2018 Anni rated it really liked it

Written in a blog diary style, these are bittersweet dispatches from life on the frontline of a failing marriage. All the agonies and joys of motherhood are here too, condensed into unforgettable moments that any woman who has ever been ‘on the edge’ will empathise with, even if you have never had to walk a baby to sleep for hours.

Extract
And that phrase – 'sleeping like a baby'. Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours i ...more

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Apr 11, 2018 Michael Ferro rated it it was amazing

Jenny Offill's DEPT. OF SPECULATION is a smorgasbord of delightfully mindful appetizers that all come together as one infinitely satisfying meal. At times hilarious, other times sad, though sometimes both, this slim novel defies much of the trope stylings of a modern doomed marriage story, instead providing the reader with an endless supply of little food for thought nuggets of wisdom and whimsey mixed among the narrative of a marriage crumbling before our eyes.

Offill has weaved plenty of specu ...more

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Mar 03, 2020 Bianca rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2020, literary-fiction, us-author, contemporary, library, female-author

Dept. Of Speculation is a modern, contemporary novel told from the perspective of a thirty something-year-old American woman, a writer, who lives in New York with her sound engineer husband and young daughter. A seemingly perfect husband and a good marriage face a huge hurdle when the husband falls in love/lust with a much younger woman - the ultimate cliche.

The vignettes and thought fragments made for a very interesting read. Despite its brevity, it's a compelling analysis of long term relatio ...more

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Aug 25, 2020 Lucy Dacus rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

ok Jenny ! geez !

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Jan 22, 2017 Mariah Roze rated it really liked it

Well this book broke me into pieces. I just felt super connected to the main character and even though I am not married and I don't have any children I was still able to put myself in that characters shoes. The author did a great job at this.

This was a fast, short, easy read that was super interesting and made you think and feel greatly! ...more

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Feb 13, 2020 Gumble's Yard rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2020

Advise for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false view of human nature it will impart … it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.

As discussed on the Radio 4 Book Club discussion of Jenny Offill's second novel

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00...

A discussion which includes a guest appearance by me asking about the space th ...more

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Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
Play Book Tag: {Poll Ballot} Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill 4 Stars	1	5	Nov 02, 2020 06:54PM
Play Book Tag: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (4 out of 5 Stars) (Decathlon)	4	16	Jun 13, 2018 10:33AM
To Be Renamed... ...: April 2018 - Dept. of Speculation	1	7	Apr 02, 2018 05:53AM
21st Century Lite...: Dept. of Speculation - General (no spoilers) (July 2017)	20	52	Aug 23, 2017 03:06PM
21st Century Lite...: Dept. of Speculation - Whole Book Discussion (July 2017)	20	56	Jul 31, 2017 09:42AM
Play Book Tag: The Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill, 2 stars	7	31	Jan 08, 2017 01:27PM

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About Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill

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Jenny Offill is an American author born in Massachusetts. Her first novel Last Things was published in 1999 was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L.A Times First Book Award.

She is also the co-editor with Elissa Schappell of two anthologies of essays and the author of several children's books She teaches in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Columbia University and Queens Univ ...more

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“But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.” — 107 likes

“If I had to sum up what he did to me, I’d say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. Both when he loved me and when he didn't.” — 73 likes

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Preview — Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Dept. of Speculation

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About Jenny Offill

Books by Jenny Offill

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Trivia About Dept. of Speculation

Quotes from Dept. of Speculation

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