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Answers : A Novel by Catherine Lacey (2017, Hardcover)
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Do we even know ourselves?. And listen for Lacey’s uncanny answers. Mary Parsons is broke. Miraculously, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive.
- Buy It NowThe Answers : A Novel by Catherine Lacey (2017, Hardcover), 1st edition
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherFarrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN-100374100268
ISBN-139780374100261
eBay Product ID (ePID)221942991
Product Key Features
Book TitleAnswers : a Novel
Number of Pages304 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2017
TopicPsychological, Literary
GenreFiction
AuthorCatherine Lacey
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1 in
Item Weight14.5 Oz
Item Length8.5 in
Item Width5.7 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2016-041342
TitleLeadingThe
ReviewsPraise for The Answers "Lacey's sentences are long and clean and unstanchable . . . she sweeps you up in the formidable current of her thought, and then she drops you down the rabbit hole. She's the real thing, and in The Answers she takes full command of her powers . . . This is a novel of intellect and amplitude that deepens as it moves forward, until you feel prickling awe at how much mental territory unfolds . . . Lacey's special gift is for capturing the realistic flickering of individual consciousness." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times "A darkly funny, tartly feminist look at the tender state of our bodies and souls in the Information Age . . . [Lacey's] work manages to be both conceptual and human, socially aware and mordant--think DeLillo for millennials--[and] captures the absurdity of a culture that persists in thinking that enlightenment is a matter of the right purchase, hashtag, or Google search." --Megan O'Grady, Vogue "[ The Answers ] directs [its] energy into an unpredictable, layered plot that will likely take most readers by surprise . . . For Lacey's remarkable skill to be fully embraced, we may need a new genre to categorize her work under . . . Her sentences are like reading an iconic prose style before it's become iconic." --Joshua James Amberson, Los Angeles Review of Books "Catherine Lacey is one of the most intelligent and brittle and funny writers of her generation. In The Answers , she builds--out of the raw stuff of bewilderment and absence--a soaring, heartbreaking work that's just on the right side of being nearly too beautiful to bear." --Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "Remarkable . . . Lacey displays an exceptional ability to articulate the elusiveness of knowing others, as well as the desire to find meaning and trust within." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Startling and stunning and compulsively strange, Lacey's sophomore novel is a haunting investigation into the nature of love . . . With otherworldly precision and subtle wit, Lacey creates a gently surreal dreamscape that's both intoxicating and profound. A singular novel; as unexpected as it is rich." -- Kirkus (starred review) "Lacey is particularly attuned to the emotional elasticity of her female characters, especially as they face problems that can feel physically taxing . . . [She] makes it easy to believe women, which been, as we all know, perhaps the hardest thing to do from a narrative standpoint at any particular time in history . . . Lacey manages to entertain us as she makes a point about women on the fringe." --Kaitlin Phillips, Bookforum "An adept novel . . . Lacey digs into the choppy turf beneath a woman's relationship to her body, her identity and her search for balance between independence and meaningful relationships . . . Lacey doesn't give us answers, but she sure gives us a wild story with a memorable protagonist." -- Shelf Awareness "Surreal, thought-provoking, and intriguingly untidy" -- Booklist, "Remarkable . . . Lacey displays an exceptional ability to articulate the elusiveness of knowing others, as well as the desire to find meaning and trust within." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review), Praise for The Answers "Catherine Lacey is one of the most intelligent and brittle and funny writers of her generation. In The Answers , she builds--out of the raw stuff of bewilderment and absence--a soaring, heartbreaking work that's just on the right side of being nearly too beautiful to bear." --Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "Remarkable . . . Lacey displays an exceptional ability to articulate the elusiveness of knowing others, as well as the desire to find meaning and trust within." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Startling and stunning and compulsively strange, Lacey's sophomore novel is a haunting investigation into the nature of love . . . With otherworldly precision and subtle wit, Lacey creates a gently surreal dreamscape that's both intoxicating and profound. A singular novel; as unexpected as it is rich." -- Kirkus (starred review) "An adept novel . . . Lacey digs into the choppy turf beneath a woman's relationship to her body, her identity and her search for balance between independence and meaningful relationships . . . Lacey doesn't give us answers, but she sure gives us a wild story with a memorable protagonist." -- Shelf Awareness "Surreal, thought-provoking, and intriguingly untidy" -- Booklist, Praise for The Answers "Lacey''s sentences are long and clean and unstanchable . . . she sweeps you up in the formidable current of her thought, and then she drops you down the rabbit hole. She''s the real thing, and in The Answers she takes full command of her powers . . . This is a novel of intellect and amplitude that deepens as it moves forward, until you feel prickling awe at how much mental territory unfolds . . . Lacey''s special gift is for capturing the realistic flickering of individual consciousness." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times " The Answers is in part a sparkling satire of our era of big data . . . But the novel is also a poignant spiritual lament, deepening the themes of Ms. Lacey''s excellent debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing . . . [Lacey''s] searching, religious dimensions add to the fresh commentary on present-day godheads to make The Answers not just one of the most ingenious novels of 2017 but also one of the most moving." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "Catherine Lacey''s dating dystopia The Answers is this summer''s must-read novel . . . A darkly funny, tartly feminist look at the tender state of our bodies and souls in the Information Age . . . [Lacey''s] work manages to be both conceptual and human, socially aware and mordant--think DeLillo for millennials--[and it] captures the absurdity of a culture that persists in thinking that enlightenment is a matter of the right purchase, hashtag, or Google search." --Megan O''Grady, Vogue "Complex and haunting . . . Masterful . . . Lacey writes loneliness and solitude with a profound depth, injecting life into the anxious fluttering of those wondering, wandering individuals who just don''t know what to do with themselves and who can''t stop asking life''s most impenetrable questions." --Laura Adamcyzyk, The A.V. Club "[ The Answers ] directs [its] energy into an unpredictable, layered plot that will likely take most readers by surprise . . . For Lacey''s remarkable skill to be fully embraced, we may need a new genre to categorize her work under . . . Her sentences are like reading an iconic prose style before it''s become iconic." --Joshua James Amberson, Los Angeles Review of Books "Catherine Lacey is one of the most intelligent and brittle and funny writers of her generation. In The Answers , she builds--out of the raw stuff of bewilderment and absence--a soaring, heartbreaking work that''s just on the right side of being nearly too beautiful to bear." --Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "Remarkable . . . Lacey displays an exceptional ability to articulate the elusiveness of knowing others, as well as the desire to find meaning and trust within." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Startling and stunning and compulsively strange, Lacey''s sophomore novel is a haunting investigation into the nature of love . . . With otherworldly precision and subtle wit, Lacey creates a gently surreal dreamscape that''s both intoxicating and profound. A singular novel; as unexpected as it is rich." -- Kirkus (starred review) "Lacey is particularly attuned to the emotional elasticity of her female characters, especially as they face problems that can feel physically taxing . . . [She] makes it easy to believe women, which been, as we all know, perhaps the hardest thing to do from a narrative standpoint at any particular time in history . . . Lacey manages to entertain us as she makes a point about women on the fringe." --Kaitlin Phillips, Bookforum "An adept novel . . . Lacey digs into the choppy turf beneath a woman''s relationship to her body, her identity and her search for balance between independence and meaningful relationships . . . Lacey doesn''t give us answers, but she sure gives us a wild story with a memorable protagonist." -- Shelf Awareness "Surreal, thought-provoking, and intriguingly untidy" -- Booklist, Praise for Nobody Is Ever Missing "Catherine Lacey's searching, emotionally resonant first novel . . . is composed mostly of long, languid sentences that push into the night like headlights. [This] slim novel impressed me, and held me to my chair. There's significant talent at work here." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times, Praise for The Answers "Catherine Lacey is one of the most intelligent and brittle and funny writers of her generation. In The Answers , she builds--out of the raw stuff of bewilderment and absence--a soaring, heartbreaking work that's just on the right side of being nearly too beautiful to bear." --Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "Remarkable . . . Lacey displays an exceptional ability to articulate the elusiveness of knowing others, as well as the desire to find meaning and trust within." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Startling and stunning and compulsively strange, Lacey's sophomore novel is a haunting investigation into the nature of love . . . With otherworldly precision and subtle wit, Lacey creates a gently surreal dreamscape that's both intoxicating and profound. A singular novel; as unexpected as it is rich." -- Kirkus (starred review) "Lacey is particularly attuned to the emotional elasticity of her female characters, especially as they face problems that can feel physically taxing . . . [She] makes it easy to believe women, which been, as we all know, perhaps the hardest thing to do from a narrative standpoint at any particular time in history . . . Lacey manages to entertain us as she makes a point about women on the fringe." --Kaitlin Phillips, Bookforum "An adept novel . . . Lacey digs into the choppy turf beneath a woman's relationship to her body, her identity and her search for balance between independence and meaningful relationships . . . Lacey doesn't give us answers, but she sure gives us a wild story with a memorable protagonist." -- Shelf Awareness "Surreal, thought-provoking, and intriguingly untidy" -- Booklist
SynopsisNAMED A TOP 10 NOVEL OF 2017 BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND VOGUE, A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY ESQUIRE , HUFFINGTON POST , POP SUGAR, ELECTRIC LITERATURE AND KIRKUS, AND A 2017 NPR GREAT READ. ONE OF DWIGHT GARNER'S TOP BOOKS OF 2017 IN THE NEW YORK TIMES . A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE AND A FINALIST FOR THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS FICTION AWARD. Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale , The Answers ] is also a novel about a subjugated woman, in this case not to a totalitarian theocracy but to subtler forces its heroine is only beginning to understand and fears she is complicit with. --Dwight Garner, New York Times Mary Parsons is broke. Dead broke, really: between an onslaught of medical bills and a mountain of credit card debt, she has been pushed to the brink. Hounded by bill collectors and still plagued by the painful and bizarre symptoms that doctors couldn't diagnose, Mary seeks relief from a holistic treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia--PAKing, for short. Miraculously, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive. Like so many young adults trying to make ends meet in New York City, Mary scours Craigslist and bulletin boards for a second job, and eventually lands an interview for a high-paying gig that's even stranger than her symptoms or the New Agey PAKing. Mary's new job title is Emotional Girlfriend in the "Girlfriend Experiment"--the brainchild of a wealthy and infamous actor, Kurt Sky, who has hired a team of biotech researchers to solve the problem of how to build and maintain the perfect romantic relationship, cast - ing himself as the experiment's only constant. Around Kurt, several women orbit as his girlfriends with spe - cific functions. There's a Maternal Girlfriend who folds his laundry, an Anger Girlfriend who fights with him, a Mundanity Girlfriend who just hangs around his loft, and a whole team of girlfriends to take care of Intimacy. With so little to lose, Mary falls headfirst into Kurt's messy, ego-driven simulacrum of human connection. Told in Catherine Lacey's signature spiraling, hypnotic prose, The Answers is both a mesmerizing dive into the depths of one woman's psyche and a critical look at the conventions and institutions that infiltrate our most personal, private moments. As Mary struggles to understand herself--her body, her city, the trials of her past, the uncertainty of her future--the reader must confront the impossible questions that fuel Catherine Lacey's work: How do you measure love? Can you truly know someone else? Do we even know ourselves? And listen for Lacey's uncanny answers., NAMED A TOP 10 NOVEL OF 2017 BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND VOGUE, A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY ESQUIRE , HUFFINGTON POST , POP SUGAR, ELECTRIC LITERATURE AND KIRKUS, AND A 2017 NPR GREAT READ. ONE OF DWIGHT GARNER'S TOP BOOKS OF 2017 IN THE NEW YORK TIMES . A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE AND A FINALIST FOR THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS FICTION AWARD. "Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale , The Answers ] is also a novel about a subjugated woman, in this case not to a totalitarian theocracy but to subtler forces its heroine is only beginning to understand and fears she is complicit with." --Dwight Garner, New York Times Mary Parsons is broke. Dead broke, really: between an onslaught of medical bills and a mountain of credit card debt, she has been pushed to the brink. Hounded by bill collectors and still plagued by the painful and bizarre symptoms that doctors couldn't diagnose, Mary seeks relief from a holistic treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia--PAKing, for short. Miraculously, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive. Like so many young adults trying to make ends meet in New York City, Mary scours Craigslist and bulletin boards for a second job, and eventually lands an interview for a high-paying gig that's even stranger than her symptoms or the New Agey PAKing. Mary's new job title is Emotional Girlfriend in the "Girlfriend Experiment"--the brainchild of a wealthy and infamous actor, Kurt Sky, who has hired a team of biotech researchers to solve the problem of how to build and maintain the perfect romantic relationship, cast - ing himself as the experiment's only constant. Around Kurt, several women orbit as his girlfriends with spe - cific functions. There's a Maternal Girlfriend who folds his laundry, an Anger Girlfriend who fights with him, a Mundanity Girlfriend who just hangs around his loft, and a whole team of girlfriends to take care of Intimacy. With so little to lose, Mary falls headfirst into Kurt's messy, ego-driven simulacrum of human connection. Told in Catherine Lacey's signature spiraling, hypnotic prose, The Answers is both a mesmerizing dive into the depths of one woman's psyche and a critical look at the conventions and institutions that infiltrate our most personal, private moments. As Mary struggles to understand herself--her body, her city, the trials of her past, the uncertainty of her future--the reader must confront the impossible questions that fuel Catherine Lacey's work: How do you measure love? Can you truly know someone else? Do we even know ourselves? And listen for Lacey's uncanny answers., In Catherine Lacey's ambitious second novel we are introduced to Mary, a young woman living in New York City and struggling to cope with a body that has betrayed her. All but paralyzed with pain, Mary seeks relief from a New Agey treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia, PAKing for short. And, remarkably, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive and Mary is dead broke. So she scours Craigslist for fast-cash jobs and finds herself applying for the "Girlfriend Experiment," the brainchild of an eccentric and narcissistic actor, Kurt Sky, who is determined to find the perfect relationship-even if that means paying different women to fulfill distinctive roles. Mary is hired as the "Emotional Girlfriend"-certainly better than the "Anger Girlfriend" or the "Maternal Girlfriend"-and is pulled into Kurt's ego-driven and messy attempt at human connection. Told in her signature spiraling prose, The Answers is full of the singular yet universal insights readers have come to expect from Lacey. It is a gorgeous hybrid of the plot- and the idea-driven novel that will leave you reeling.
LC Classification NumberPS3612.A335A85 2017
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