02488cam a2200373 i 4500 608335474 TxAuBib 20221101120000.0 130531s2014||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2013019367 9780385350815 hardback 0385350813 hardback 9780345806871 paperback 0345806875 paperback 9780385351027 e-book 038535102X e-book (OCoLC)842880677 TxAuBib rda Offill, Jenny, 1968- Dept. of speculation / Jenny Offill. Department of speculation. First edition. New York : A lfred A.Knopf, [2014] 179 pages ; 20 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier "Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes--a colicky baby, bedbugs, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions--the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it, as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation can be read in a single sitting, but there are enough bracing emotional insights in these pages to fill a much longer novel. "-- Provided by publisher. 20221101. Marriage Fiction. Families Fiction. Domestic fiction. Psychological fiction.