✨ Featured Offer
Used, Very Good
$7.16
List Price: $23.95
🚚
See all 5 offers from $5.53 FREE standard delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
Overview
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER
From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a "darkly funny and urgent" (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience--but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
"Offill's fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun..." --The New York Times
From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a "darkly funny and urgent" (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience--but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
"Offill's fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun..." --The New York Times
| ISBN-13 | 9780385351102 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0385351100 |
| Weight | 0.62 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 4.73 x 0.89 x 7.52 In |
| List Price | $23.95 |
| Format | Hardcover |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Pages | 224 pages |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Published On | 2020-02-11 |
View All Offers
Sort by:
Price
Condition
Seller
Seller Comments
Price
Used, Good
Seller details
Goodwill
Brooklyn Park, MN, USA
All pages and cover are intact including the dust cover if applicable. Spine may show signs of wea...
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
Used, Good
Seller details
Zoom Books East
Glendale Heights, IL, USA
Book is in good condition and may include underlining highlighting and minimal wear. The book can al...
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
Used, Good
Seller details
Evergreen Goodwill
Seattle, WA, USA
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
✨ Used, Very Good
Seller details
The Maryland Book Bank
baltimore, MD, USA
Used-Very Good.
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026
Used, Good
Seller details
HPB-Red
Dallas, TX, USA
Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used textbooks may not include companion materials s...
Free delivery by: 30 Mar 2026