Claire-Louise Bennett’s short fiction and essays have been published in The Moth, The Irish Times, and other publications. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013. Pond is her first book. Bennett lives in Galway, Ireland.
"[An] auspicious debut … Bennett seems to know exactly what to take
seriously. She puts us inside a complicated, teeming mind, and she
doesn’t dabble in forced epiphanies... Sometimes first novels
like Pond are one-offs. They deliver a voice the author can’t tap
again. Ms. Bennett’s sensibility here feels like the tip of a deep
iceberg, and I’ll be in line to read whatever she publishes next.
Her witty misanthropy is here to ward off mental scurvy." –The
New York Times
"Imagine a short-story collection written by Emily Dickinson, and
you’ll get the weird genius of this book.” –The Boston Globe
“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … one of those books so odd
and vivid they make your own life feel strangely remote. Somehow,
Bennett has written a fantasy novel for grownups that is a kind of
extended case for living an existence that threatens to slip out of
tune...Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of
real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great
depths.” –The New York Times Book Review
“A work of fiction that will make you feel pleasantly
insane…Like Lydia Davis, Bennett…takes a state of mind closely
associated with madness and places it in settings that are utterly
domestic, mundane. The result is fervid and fearful...It is also
funny…unnerving… sensitive to the point of being porous…lucid,
practical, and excruciatingly cognizant of what is
normal.” –The New Yorker
“Dazzling…[an] exquisitely written and daring debut work of
fiction…Pond’s lovely strangeness lies in just how intimate we feel
with our heroine despite knowing so little about her. By eschewing
exposition, Bennett’s novel demonstrates the elucidating power of
simply recording a consciousness at work, a state of being – a
“mind in motion.” –O, the Oprah Magazine
“The sort of avant-garde opus destined to put its author on the map
alongside modern-day prose stylists of the highest order...The tilt
of Bennett’s pen (or the stroke of her key) lends gravity to
anything it touches… This collection is for wiseasses and weirdos,
a cathedral of strange sentences... built upon the singular
experience of being a human being. It contains only sharp
observations and a constant juggling between beauty and decay,
moments stretched and skewed like leaded glass…Pond sparkles
with witty one-liners…[a] gorgeous book.” –Los Angeles Review
of Books
"[T]his Woolfian novella will challenge all your ideas of
narrative. Dreamlike fragments of a life drift in and out of frame,
with startling prose that will make your usual perspective feel
like sleepwalking." –Elle
“Bennett’s prose—ardent, addictively obsessive-compulsive, a little
feral—is from another galaxy, or maybe another century. Her delight
in nature and gardening can be kookily romantic…and yet one could
also imagine her taking an improbably cheerful seat among the
modernists…A man alone is a visionary; a woman alone is a witch—or
worse, Bridget Jones. But Bennett spins something entirely
different from her separateness, a kind of philosophy of being in
the world as a writer both refreshing and hard-won." –Vogue
“Innovative, beguiling…meditative…a fresh new voice from seemingly
out of nowhere…Reading Bennett’s book of loosely linked stories is
a lovely retreat from the cacophony of contemporary life…wryly
intelligent…quirky…[and] brightly original.” –Los Angeles Times
“[A] smart, funny, elliptical debut…Reminiscent of Joyce and
Beckett in its unmistakably Irish blend of earthy wit and
existential unease. Yet Bennett does much more than emulate
literary forebears. Pond expressed her unique sensibility in
deceptively simply, delightfully unsettled prose. We’ll be hearing
more from this formidably gifted young writer.” –The Boston
Globe
"[Pond] contains no story, no action and...one describable
character and is defined as much by these absences as by the
material that remains. What’s left on the page are the gleanings of
a “mind in motion,” to borrow Ms. Bennett’s phrase—reflections on
everyday objects, philosophical digressions, daydreams and
stirred-up memories and associations... The book is reminiscent of
a country diary, with entries that dwell on the narrator’s
breakfast routine or her vegetable garden...Hers is a mind in
attentive communion with itself, building baroque and beautiful
cloud castles of thought to distract from the storms of the real."
–Wall Street Journal
“An elegant and intoxicating debut novel…rich with strange,
sensuous and exhilarating moods and textures…we are captivated by
the narrator’s sharply illuminated interior reality and her lyrical
depictions of the nature about her. Boldly defying convention, Pond
is an exceptional debut with beautiful hidden
depths.” –Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A fascinating and utterly immersive reading experience that speaks
volumes about the author’s creative process and delivers insights
in droves...compulsively readable and wacky…[Bennett has] diffused
our often confusing and chaotic world into something more
manageable, yet all the while making itty-bitty molehills into
mountains.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“[A] cool, curious dive into a world of minutiae… intense, and
often wickedly funny.” –Christian Science Monitor
“Immediately, the prose in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond feels new
but deeply familiar — like the voice in your head but dialed just
to the left. You are dropped into the book without your wits about
you, and you may not totally recover them. It’s
exhilarating…...[Her] solitude offers the mental freedom to digress
and to proclaim and to spend pages on beautifully ludicrous
digressions. Within these digressions are details, and
idiosyncratic, almost-confessional meditations on those details
that would put Knausgaard to shame. This is a woman at her most
comfortable, her most confident…I think someone should award
[Bennett] a great prize so that she can write us all something
new.” –NYMag's The Cut
“Muddiness is not typically a positive description for a narrative,
but this mud is sparkling, full of mica and minerals that glitter
with color when the sun’s rays hit. It’s through this glistening
mud that Bennett’s readers get to mudlark, mucking about in prose
that is alternatively deliberate and crisp, surrealistic and
unknowable, to find real gems of observation and language… deeply
satisfying and refreshing…Bennett stomps all over
writing-dude-in-nature territory without having to set a foot off
her main character’s property line.” –New Republic
"Sharp and witty…wonderfully discursive…Pond is maybe best
understood as an embrace of all that wriggles in the dirt, and an
experiment in uncovering that engrossing underworld beneath our
more refined and constructed selves through the act of writing.
Bennett…writes through the dramatic into something deeper, and the
result is a reverie of ‘fervid primary visions,’ the dredging of a
riverine mind.” –The Millions
"A phenomenal combination of hilarity and stillness with a weird
undercurrent of menace that never quite rises to the surface but
always leaves you slightly uneasy even as you are smiling about
something brilliant the writer has managed to capture in the short
space of a few pages.” –The Awl
“Impressive indeed.” –Vol 1 Brooklyn
“Reminiscent of Norwegian writer Karl Knausgård as much as it is
Thoreau and Zadie Smith.” –Refinery29
"Compelling [and] innovative …Bennett’s unique portrait of a
persona emerges with an intensity and vision not often seen, or
felt, in a debut.” –Poets & Writers
“Pond, in its quirky structure and language, calls to mind the
Irish fathers of literary modernism Joyce and Beckett. But then it
also echoes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Carroll's Alice, Thoreau's
Walden and, more contemporarily, Strout's Olive Kitteridge, as well
as anything by Nicholson Baker…Bennett's narrator is a funny,
self-deprecating, observant, opinionated, earthy woman whose mind
grasps every detailed string of her rural life and gives it a pull
to reveal her curiosity and contented solitude…What a treasure,
this woman!” –Shelf Awareness
“Beautiful and brief.” –Brooklyn Magazine
“Ireland is never mentioned outright in Claire-Louise Bennett's
debut, but it is undeniably there … even if just in the
extraordinary language constructing every sentence… With a rich
Irish literary tradition marked by behemoths like W.B. Yeats and
James Joyce, there are many books one can pick up to prepare for a
trip to Ireland. However, Bennett represents the modern writer who
is left to carry on such a mantel; she will not disappoint.” –The
Week, “What to Read Based on Where You’re Traveling this
Summer”
“[Pond is] packed with vivid imagery of a quiet life, and deep
reflections from an unquiet mind. It’s excellent, it’s ravishing,
it’ll win a ton of awards, it’ll show up on everyone’s Best of 2016
lists……bravely original.” --Fiction Advocate
“A formally inventive work that slips past traditional storytelling
to focus on impression as it chronicles the interior life of a
single, unnamed woman dwelling on Ireland’s coast.” -Library
Journal
"Mysteriously but wryly told...it is unlike anything else; its 20
stories portray the things we take for granted as being important,
vital and worthy of us paying much closer
attention." –National Post
"Innovative and elegant...In her celebration of minutiae, Bennett
recreates the experience of a believable, uniquely captivating
persona. Pond deserves to be discovered and dived into, so
thoroughly does Bennett submerge readers into her meticulously
dazzling world.” –Booklist (starred)
"Captivating...Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and
undeniably wonderful." –Publisher's Weekly (starred)
"What Bennett aims at is nothing short of a re-enchantment of the
world. ... This is a truly stunning debut, beautifully written and
profoundly witty." –The Guardian
“A beautiful, lasting book that privileges modes of human
experience that are so often undervalued, if they are
acknowledged at all: neither formative encounters nor outward
achievement, but rather the workings of a roving, inquisitive
mind, open and receptive to all.” –Literary Review
(London)
“[An] artful collection of shut-in soliloquies…striking.” -The
Telegraph, “What to Read in 2015”
“Elegantly inventive.” –Financial Times
“A wild, rewardingly ecstatic ride.” –The Globe and Mail
“Elegant and funny and seems to find a whole new space in the
form.” –Eimear McBride, TLS, “Books of the Year”
“A touch of William Gaddis. A touch of Lydia Davis. A
touch of Samuel Beckett. A touch of Edna O'Brien. And
yet Claire-Louise Bennett's POND feels entirely unique.
Quiet and luxurious all at once, this will be one of the most
sensational debuts of the year.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the
Great World Spin
"Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction
ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don't be
fooled by Pond's small size. It contains multitudes." —Jenny
Offill, author of Department of Speculation
"Pond is brilliant — sharp and absorbing, compassionate and
funny — and Claire-Louise Bennett is a deeply original writer
with talent to spare. I can't stop thinking about this book."
—Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
"As brilliant a debut and as distinct a voice as we've heard in
years--this is a real writer with the real goods."--Kevin Barry,
author of Beatlebone and City of Bohane
“I’d heard more good whispers about Pond than almost any other
debut this year. . . . These stories are intelligent and funny,
innovative and provocative, and it’s impossible to read them
without thinking that here is a writer who has only just begun to
show what she can do.” —Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a
Half-Formed Thing
“Extraordinary . . . profoundly original though not eccentric,
sharp and tender, funny and deeply engaging. A very new sort of
writing . . . an acute, satisfying, delicate, honest meditation on
both the joys and frustrations of a life fully lived in solitude.
Take it slowly, because it is worth it, and be impressed and
joyful.” —Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence
“Wielding a wry but implacable logic, Claire-Louise Bennett dives
under the surface of ‘ordinary’ experiences and things to reveal
their supreme and giddy illogic. Like . . . Lydia Davis . . . she
writes an impeccable affectless prose that almost magically arrives
at something extraordinary.” —Chris Kraus, author of I Love
Dick
“Claire-Louise Bennett is a major writer to be discovered and
treasured.” —Deborah Levy, author of Swimming Home
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