E-book
No one is talking about this : a novel
Record details
- ISBN: 0593189604
- ISBN: 9780593189603
- ISBN: 9780593189580
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Physical Description:
remote
1 online resource - Publisher: New York : Riverhead Books, 2021.
Content descriptions
| Source of Description Note: | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Social media -- Fiction FICTION / Humorous / General Social media |
| Genre: | Electronic books. Electronic books. Fiction. |
Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2021 January #1
*Starred Review* In this first novel from poet and memoirist Lockwood (Priestdaddy, 2017), an unnamed woman practically lives in the portal, which is something like the internet. A viral postâCan a dog be twins?âlent her a certain airy prominence, and now she speaks about the portal on panels all over the world. On the top of a Ferris wheel in Vienna, she receives a text that sends her back home to Ohio: concerning information has appeared late in her younger sister's pregnancy. So begins the book's part two, and the first stirrings of a conventional plot. Lockwood's narration of the woman's thoughts propels this provocative, addictive, and unusual novel. The book's first half is filled with her darkly irreverent, mordant musings on the portal and how it got to this, a screen-addled situation that sounds much like our own. After the revelation, though, the scroll of posts and memes is replaced by another unfathomable yet recognizable place, one of sickness, doctors' best guesses, and a crystalline hope for survival; it's like a stream rushing to an ocean. With unfettered, imagistic language, Lockwood conjures both a digital life that's easily fallen into, and the sorts of love and grief that can make it all fall away. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2020 December #2
Debut novel from the internet-famous poet and author of the memoir Priestdaddy (2017). Lockwood first made a name for herself on Twitter: "@parisreview So is Paris any good or not." Such was the acclaim of this 2013 tweet that the Paris Reviewà felt compelled to respond to itâa year after it was first postedâwith a review of Paris. In 2013, Lockwood achieved a new level of web-based fame when "Rape Joke" went viral. This poem seems, in retrospect, to have been perfectly calibrated for a moment when peopleâmostly young or youngish, largely onlineâwere asking themselves who gets to talk about what and how. But it also succeedsâand continues to succeedâas a work of literature. All of this is to say that Lockwood is very much of the internet but also, perhaps, our guide to moving beyond thinking of the internet as a thing apart from real lives and real art. Her debut novel is divided into two parts. The first introduces us to a nameless protagonist who makes up famous tweets and composes blog posts and turns this into a career traveling the world talking about tweets and blog posts. In the second part, this character goes back to her family home when she learns that the baby her sister is carrying has a profound congenital disorder. The first part is written in short little bursts that feel like Instagram captions or textsâbut if Lydia Davis was writing Instagram captions and texts. The second part is written in short little bursts that feel like they're being written in spare moments snatched while caring for an infant. (Again, Lydia Davis comes to mind.) This bifurcation mirrors the protagonist's own meditations on the difference between the life that she chooses online and the life that comes crashing in on her, but it's a mistake to imagine that this novel is simply an indictment of the former and a celebration of the latter. The woman at the center of this novel doesn't trade ironic laughter for soul-shattering awe so much as she reveals that both can coexist in the same life and that, sometimes, they may be indistinguishable. An insightfulâfrequently funny, often devastatingâmeditation on human existence online and off. Copyright Kirkus 2021 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2020 September
Having suddenly gained fame on social media, a woman traveling worldwide to meet her worshipful fans comes to believe that all the voices bubbling up from this vast portal, as she calls it, are dictating her thoughts. Then she gets an urgent call from her mother, as stark reality and internet-fueled surreality collide. From the author of the memoir
Copyright 2020 Library Journal.Priestdaddy , aNew York Times best book. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2020 November #2
Lockwood's debut novel comes packed with the humor, bawdiness, and lyrical insight that buoyed her memoir
Copyright 2020 Publishers Weekly.Priestdaddy . The unnamed narratorâmade famous by a viral post that read, "Can a dog be twins"âtravels the world to speak on panels, where she explains such things as why it's better to use the spelling "sneazing" (it's "objectively funnier"). While in Vienna for a conference, her mother urges her to come home to Ohio, where the narrator's younger sister is having complications with her pregnancy and may need a late-term abortion. There, in the book's shimmering second half, the internet jokes continue between the sisters as a means of coping with uncertainty, and resonate with the theme of life's ephemerality vs. the internet's infinitude. Throughout, a fragmented style captures and sometimes elevates a series of text messages and memes amid the meditations on family ("I'm convinced the world is getting too full lol, her brother texted her, the one who obliterated himself at the end of every day with a personal comet called Fireball"). This mighty novel screams with laughter just as it wallops with grief.Agent: Mollie Glick, Creative Arts Agency. (Feb.)
