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Dept. of Speculation

Jenny Offill

3.73 · Rating details · 31,392 ratings · 4,720 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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· 31,392 ratings · 4,720 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.

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Apr 15, 2015 s.penkevich rated it liked it

Shelves: road_map_of_life, relationships

‘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) ...more

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Feb 04, 2015 Idarah rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-2015, 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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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 . Like the film director in Fellini’s film, Offill’s writer is bereft ...more

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Jan 05, 2014 Greg rated it liked it

Shelves: girls-girls-girls, fiction, reviewed

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

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 ...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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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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Jun 09, 2016 Roger Brunyate rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sui-generis, women, top-reviews

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 for

...more

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Jan 03, 2015 christa rated it it was amazing

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 ...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, ...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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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 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 03, 2015 Jenna rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reviewed, 2015-reading-challenge, favorite-novels-of-all-time, favorite-reads-of-2015, 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 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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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.

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Jan 19, 2017 Elyse (semi hiatus) 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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Jun 03, 2013 Janet rated it it was amazing

Shelves: arc, events, have-met-or-will-meet-author, ebooks, one-day-reads, favorites

I found myself gasping at the sheer beauty and conciseness of Offill's sentences. This book can be devoured in two hours, or you can languish in it over many sittings (or both). It's about love and loneliness and grief and joy and fidelity and beauty and depression and mania and motherhood and writing. The shifting points of view were subtle yet profound, and, despite the darkness and sadness of the story, when I closed the book, I was left more alert and attentive, more alive. Highly ...more

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Feb 07, 2014 Cheeky 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 ...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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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!

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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 ...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 ...more

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Jun 13, 2013 Tyler Goodson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: six-stars, arcs, book-club

This novel is some kind of magic trick. I don't know how else to explain how this envelope of a book, like a genie's lamp, contains so much story, truth, heartbreak, and wisdom. It left as big an impression as a tome, and in 160 odd pages that is something special.

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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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Sep 13, 2014 Elyse (semi hiatus) Walters rated it it was amazing

Original!

Sometimes Hilarious!

Absorbing and beautifully tenderly absurd slim novel that strikes a cord of truth.

A meaningful story.

Reveals the light within the darkness!

A one sitting read!

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Aug 17, 2015 Teresa rated it really liked it

Recommended to Teresa by: Cathrine

A couple of friends had recommended this book to me and then ·Karen·'s review stating its contradistinction to Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment sent me, intrigued, to immediately request it from the library. With very similar stories, the writing couldn't be more different. I'm not always a fan of minimalist writing and in the beginning I didn't think I was going to care for it here. But then not too far along, something clicked and I 'got' it. There's a major difference to the stories ...more

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Aug 14, 2014 Lee Klein rated it liked it

There's a tricky point of view thing in this in which early on the husband is addressed as "you" and then, when husband and wife experience marital difficulties, the intimacy of that direct address is lost (he's called "he") until the very end, midway through the final page (it's not really a spoiler), when the husband is addressed as "you" again. And that's exactly the sort of thing that maybe kept me from giving this four stars -- although it superficially presents a "real" reality it does so There's a tricky point of view thing in this in which early on the husband is addressed as "you" and then, when husband and wife experience marital difficulties, the intimacy of that direct address is lost (he's called "he") until the very end, midway through the final page (it's not really a spoiler), when the husband is addressed as "you" again. And that's exactly the sort of thing that maybe kept me from giving this four stars -- although it superficially presents a "real" reality it does so through a scrim of contemporary "reality hunger" literary technique, replete with quotation and Rilke this time instead of the ubiquitous Bruno Schulz. The climactic scene is presented too as though she's workshopping a student story, questioning the heavy rain, suggesting something be added "a beat" before the action continues. And on the last page it snows without self-consciousness. Which I get, but which also doesn't exactly turn me on -- or maybe it's the same old story (and dramatic structure) filtered through the new anti-story "technology of heartbreak" convention as in Lorrie Moore's story about her baby's cancer ("People Like That Are The Only People Here") or Rick Moody's story "Demonology" about his sister's death or more recently Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Knausgaard, even Tao Lin and other literary autobiographical enthusiasts. It's 177 pages I read in a few hours thanks to short chapters and little jags no longer than two tweets. At times I wanted to compare it to Knausgaard's domestic artistic reality drama but I think it comes down to the lack of pressure Knausgaard puts on the details? In this, everything signifies or stresses, has tension to it, cleverness, poignancy. Knausgaard not so much -- he's about trees and sun and patterns, and comparatively, for a certified Art Monster (in Book Two) he comes off as enlightened, as someone naturally aware of the ambiguity of nature? In this, the narrator often comes off like a neurotic New York navel-gazing negatron, superficially and selfishly questing for answers from Buddhism, art, yoga, therapy, meds. It's of course wrong to treat this as "110%" autobiography, to dissolve the border between author and narrator, but, maybe other than the initial motherhood pages, the self-concern seemed self-enclosed in this, whereas Knausgaard's involutions somehow open up and let me in? Anyway, a very short, fast, airily formatted book available for $22.95 in hardcover from a publisher based in one of the most expensive areas of one of the most expensive cities in the world. Got it from the library for free. It's not due for three weeks. Maybe I'll read it 21 more times? Some striking quotations (a great Kafka aphorism I've never seen before: "I write to close my eyes") and little movements, plus the formatting and length make its completion in a sitting a possibility, which is a distinct readerly dealio at play compared to, say, reading something like Doctor Faustus, every chapter of which may have surpassed this one in word count. A "good read" but not much more than that for me, even if things are totally "relatable" for this married writer who's taught creative writing at the college level living in a northeastern city with a young daughter. No LOLs despite jokes. Alive, yes, alas, but still not enough for me? ...more

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Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
Play Book Tag: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (4 out of 5 Stars) (Decathlon)	4	13	Jun 13, 2018 10:33AM
To Be Renamed... ...: April 2018 - Dept. of Speculation	1	6	Apr 02, 2018 05:53AM
21st Century Lite...: Dept. of Speculation - General (no spoilers) (July 2017)	20	47	Aug 23, 2017 03:06PM
21st Century Lite...: Dept. of Speculation - Whole Book Discussion (July 2017)	20	54	Jul 31, 2017 09:42AM
Play Book Tag: The Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill, 2 stars	7	27	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 ...more