Since then, she has taught writing at universities in New York and North Carolina, and in September she will take up a post as a visiting writer at Vassar College. Offill began writing Last Things shortly out of college, while on a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and it was published eight years later. of Speculation consists of fragments, most of them well under half a page, that relate the narrator’s trajectory from unattached young woman to wife and mother interspersed with these are tenets of Buddhism and Manichaeism, self-help jargon and quotations from Rilke, Simone Weil, Hesiod and Antarctic explorers. The very large and the very small, along with philosophy and history, poetry and religion, recontextualise - for Offill’s characters and for her readers - the ordinary and not so ordinary events of domestic life. In Last Things (1999), Offill’s debut, eight-year-old Grace, homeschooled by her increasingly erratic mother, learns mainly about the formation of the universe and the insects that will remain after mammalian extinction. of Speculation(2014), Jenny Offill’s second novel, the writer-narrator is distracted from writing a second novel by motherhood and the revelation of her husband’s affair, but also by a bedbug infestation and a job ghostwriting a history of the space programme for a failed astronaut.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |