LoveReading Says
Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize - A Reader's Review
This is a bit bonkers and I'm not sure I really understood it but I *think* it's about the fragmented and disorientating experience of living ones life online in social media spaces, and if it is then it does that quite cleverly! If you're over a certain age you'll find yourself looking up memes and gen-Z stuff you never knew existed in "WTF, was that for real?" moments. - Tanya Carus
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No One Is Talking About This Synopsis
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE & A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021
WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE
"A book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
"Wow. I can't remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book. What an inventive and startling writer…I'm so glad I read this. I really think this book is remarkable." -David Sedaris
From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet?
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?"
Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.
Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.
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Patricia Lockwood Press Reviews
A formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases - New York Times Book Review
Reading Patricia Lockwood feels like looking through a kaleidoscope built by a mischievous sorcerer - the world is suddenly rearranged in fragments that are cosmic, wondrous, humiliating, and profane. No One Is Talking About This is a furiously original novel, alive and unstable; the book builds to a reminder of how devastation and connection produce each other, endlessly and surprisingly, both on the internet and in human places that our shared digital consciousness can never reach -- Jia Tolentino
I really admire and love this book. Patricia Lockwood is a completely singular talent and this is her best, funniest, weirdest, most affecting work yet -- Sally Rooney
Glorious. It crackles with energy and life. It's funny, it's hectic, and it will sometimes trip you up with a sudden sense of anger and pain . . . A genuine original - Sunday Times on 'Priestdaddy'
Patricia Lockwood has produced from her peculiar childhood something that is exceptional - exquisitely written, funny, disturbing and freighted with insight, lightly worn - Daily Telegraph on 'Priestdaddy'
Lockwood's prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris . . . It is, for sure, like no book I have read - New York Times on 'Priestdaddy'
Funny and anarchic . . . Priestdaddy is a piece of autobiographical writing like no other . . . Naughty, innocent, truthful - The Times on 'Priestdaddy'
One of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time . . . A combination of manic levity and profound unease, a sense of genuine injustice tethered to a smart-alec whipcrack - Spectator on 'Priestdaddy'
Brilliantly silly . . . A dazzling comic memoir - Guardian on 'Priestdaddy'
One of America's most relevant and funniest writers. Lockwood's humour - conversational, sensitive, mordant - serves as her work's bedrock and signature . . . Priestdaddy will certainly make you laugh out loud. But it will also move you to tears - Playboy on 'Priestdaddy'
Extraordinary - Observer on 'Priestdaddy'
About Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood was born in a trailer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, and the memoir Priestdaddy, which was named one of the ten best books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review and one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the Guardian. Lockwood's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
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