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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation comes a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis. Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink—she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction—but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation comes a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis. Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink—she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction—but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
One
In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. “Bucket of black paint,” it means.
I spend some time pulling books for the doomed adjunct. He has been working on his dissertation for eleven years. I give him reams of copy paper. Binder clips and pens. He is writing about a philosopher I have never heard of. He is minor, but instrumental, he told me. Minor but instrumental!
But last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you’re doing right now making money? it said.
The man in the shabby suit does not want his fines lowered. He is pleased to contribute to our institution. The blond girl whose nails are bitten to the quick stops by after lunch and leaves with a purse full of toilet paper.
I brave a theory about vaccinations and another about late capitalism. “Do you ever wish you were thirty again?” asks the lonely heart engineer. “No, never,” I say. I tell him that old joke about going backward.
We don’t serve time travelers here. A time traveler walks into the bar.
On the way home, I pass the lady who sells whirling things. Sometimes when the students are really stoned, they’ll buy them. “No takers today,” she says. I pick out one for Eli. It’s blue and white, but blurs to blue in the wind. Don’t forget quarters, I remember.
At the bodega, Mohan gives me a roll of them. I admire his new cat, but he tells me it just wandered in. He will keep it though because his wife no longer loves him.
“I wish you were a real shrink,” my husband says. “Then we’d be rich.”
…
Henry’s late. And this after I took a car service so I wouldn’t be. When I finally spot him, he’s drenched. No coat, no umbrella. He stops at the corner, gives change to the woman in the trash- bag poncho.
My brother told me once that he missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him. 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....
About the Author-
JENNY OFFILL is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award) and Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen-Faulkner Award, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low-residency program at Queens University.
Reviews-
Starred review from November 18, 2019 A librarian becomes increasingly obsessed with doomsday preparations in Offill’s excellently sardonic third novel (following Dept. of Speculation). Lizzie, a university librarian working in Brooklyn, already feels overwhelmed with guiding her son, Eli, through New York City’s crowded elementary school system without the extra strain of dealing with her addict brother’s constant crises. Mostly happily married to a computer game designer, Lizzie introduces anxiety into her marriage when she takes a second job answering emails for a former mentor who is now the host of a popular podcast about futurism. Fielding questions from both apocalypse truthers and preppers for the coming climate-induced “scarcity,” Lizzies becomes convinced that doomsday is approaching. Her scattered, frenzied voice is studded with arresting flourishes, as when she describes releasing a fly: “Quiet in the cup. Hard to believe that isn’t joy, the way it flies away when I fling it out the window.” Set against the backdrop of Lizzie’s trips to meditation classes, debates with a taxi driver, the 2016 presidential election, and constant attempts to avoid a haughty parent at Eli’s school, Lizzie’s apocalyptic worries are bittersweet, but also always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel.
Starred review from December 1, 2019 An ever growing list of worries, from a brother with drug problems to a climate change apocalypse, dances through the lively mind of a university librarian. In its clever and seductive replication of the inner monologue of a woman living in this particular moment in history, Offill's (Dept. of Speculation, 2014, etc.) third novel might be thought of as a more laconic cousin of Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport. Here, the mind we're embedded in is that of a librarian named Lizzie--an entertaining vantage point despite her concerns big and small. There's the lady with the bullhorn who won't let her walk her sensitive young son into his school building. Her brother, who has finally gotten off drugs and has a new girlfriend but still requires her constant, almost hourly, support. Her mentor, Sylvia, a national expert on climate change, who is fed up with her fans and wants Lizzie to take over answering her mail. ("These people long for immortality, but can't wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee," says Sylvia.) "Malodorous," "Defacing," "Combative," "Humming," "Lonely": These are just a few of the categories in a pamphlet called Dealing With Problem Patrons that Lizzie's been given at work, Also, her knee hurts, and she's spending a fortune on car service because she fears she's Mr. Jimmy's only customer. Then there are the complex mixed messages of a cable show she can't stop watching: Extreme Shopper. Her husband, Ben, a video game designer and a very kind man, is getting a bit exasperated. As the new president is elected and the climate change questions pour in and the doomsday scenarios pile up, Lizzie tries to hold it together. The tension between mundane daily concerns and looming apocalypse, 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.
COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from December 1, 2019 Ofill follows her best-selling previous novel, Dept. of Speculation (2014), with another crisply revelatory portrait of a marriage and family in flux. Narrator Lizzie is a feral university librarian, lacking the degree yet possessing the requisite inquiring intelligence and forbearing sense of humor. Her husband is a classics scholar turned educational video game designer, and their young son is sweetly comic and precocious. Lizzie also tends to her neurotic brother, whose battle against drug addiction is ongoing, and her fixed-income mother. Enter Lizzie's college mentor, Sylvia, who cajoles her into accepting a side gig handling the end-times-lunatic messages from the increasingly vociferous audience for Sylvia's controversially bleak podcast, Hell and High Water. Climate change, pollution, toxic politics surrounding the 2016 election, rich people and their doomsteads and working-class preppers, and disaster psychology all preoccupy Lizzie in addition to the relentless everyday clamor and madness. She finds refuge in composing rueful, mordantly funny, razor-sharp journal entries, documenting moments ludicrous, frightening, and tender. She muses, I have to be careful. My heart is prodigal. 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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)
September 1, 2019
Following the New York Times best-booked Dept. of Speculation and Last Things, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Book Award, Offill introduces us to Lizzie Benson, a librarian (though not by the traditional route) who's barely able to spend time with her husband and son as she fusses over her devout mother and addict brother. An old mentor wants Lizzie to help her answer mail she's been receiving in response to her podcast Hell and High Water, and eventually Lizzie must look to the larger world and recognize that she can't save everyone--though she keeps trying.
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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