No One Is Talking About This: A Novel by Patricia Lockwood

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.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of a novel, No One Is Talking About This; a memoir, Priestdaddy; and two poetry collections, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. Her works have been selected for series such as the Best American Essays, the Best American Poetry, and the Norton Anthology of American Literature. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.

No One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood
Novel
February 16, 2021
Publisher: ‎Riverhead Books
Language:‎ English
Hardcover
224 pages
ISBN-10: ‎ 0593189582
ISBN-13: 978-0593189580
$22.49
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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