Weather

Fair enough, I said. We were at the supermarket. All around us things tried to announce their true nature. But their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.

I try to get him warmed up quickly: soup, coffee. He looks good, I think. Clear- eyed. The waitress makes a new pot, flirts with him. People used to stop my mother on the street. What a waste, they d say. Eyelashes like that on a boy!

So now we have extra bread. I eat three pieces while my brother tells me a story about his NA meeting. A woman stood up and started ranting about antidepressants. What upset her most was that people were not disposing of them properly. They tested worms in the city sewers and found they contained high concentrations of Paxil and Prozac.

When birds ate these worms, they stayed closer to home, made more elaborate nests, but appeared unmotivated to mate. But were they happier? I ask him. Did they get more done in a given day?
 

 
The window in our bedroom is open. You can see the moon if you lean out and crane your neck. The Greeks thought it was the only heavenly object similar to Earth. Plants and animals fifteen times stronger than our own inhabited it.

My son comes in to show me something. It looks like a pack of gum, but it s really a trick. When you try to take a piece, a metal spring snaps down on your finger. It hurts more than you think, he warns me.

Ow.

I tell him to look out the window. That s a wax-ing crescent, Eli says. He knows as much now about the moon as he ever will, I suspect. At his old school, they taught him a song to remember all its phases. Sometimes

author's place among the vanguard of writers who are reinvigorating literature.
--O The Oprah Magazine

Compact and wholly contemporary, Jenny Offill s third novel sees a librarian find deep meaning and deep despair in her side gig as an armchair therapist for those in existential crisis, including liberals fearing climate apocalypse and conservatives fearing the demise of American values. As she attempts to save everyone, our protagonist is driven to her limits, making for a canny, comic story about the power of human need.
--Esquire

Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence luminous.  
--The Boston Globe

"Genius... [A] lapidary masterwork... Remarkable and resonant... The right novel for the end of the world."
--The LA Times

"Another perfectly wonderful trip inside the mind of Jenny Offill... [Her] fiction is such a pleasure to read... the funniness of many of her sentences indicates how precisely she calibrates them."
--Slate

Ptent... Offill is a master of the glancing blow."
--NPR.org

Glorious, dizzying, disconcerting and often laugh-out-loud hysterical
--USA Today

"Always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Clever and seductive . . . the "weather" of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor. Offill is good company for the end of the world."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Revelatory . . . Offill, who will delight fans of Lydia Davis and Joy Williams, performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from "tipping into the abyss."
--Booklist (starred review)

This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy.
--Ocean Vuong

"Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It s this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present."
--Ben Lerner

"No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill." 
--Jia Tolentino

"Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes."
--Sheila Heti

Novelists don t need to dream the end of the world anymore they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it s as if they are all cut from one diamond.
--Jonathan Dee

"Weather is a beautiful book, both subtle and powerful. In writing, that s a superhuman feat. And now is exactly when we need the superhumans. Make haste. Read it."
--Lydia Millet


"There is no doubt that Jenny Offill is the writer for this particular historical moment. Weather is a tour de force of her considerable and startling gifts: the compressed and gorgeous sentences, the astounding comic timing, the profound and wise surprises. The miracle of this novel is how it looks at our contradictions and conditions with such bracing honesty and yet gives us a tender hopefulness toward these fraught humans. Offill makes us feel implicated but also loved."
--Dana Spiotta