Anna Moschovakis's books include They and We Will Get into Trouble for This, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (winner of the James Laughlin Award), and English translations of Albert Cossery's The Jokers, Annie Ernaux's The Possession, and Bresson on Bresson. She is a longtime member of the Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and cofounder of Bushel, a collectively run art and community space in the Catskills. This is her first novel.
"Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets
itself the task of asking the big questions--What am I? What was I?
What will I be?--in a style that evokes Lispector and Camus but
with the self-referential and weary globalism of the current
milieu. A consummately accomplished novel. A worthy treatise on the
now." --Kirkus, starred review
"Performance art in print." --Publishers Weekly
"A brilliant, visceral, sensual examination of the condition of
being a woman, and the inherent struggles related to identity and
authority that exist for all of us." --Nylon
"Anna Moschovakis has done something remarkable." --Los Angeles
Review of Books
"Moschovakis's novel is braided and experimental, yet it looks for
illumination in the plainspoken and the authentic." --Wall Street
Journal
"[A] book meant for those of us whose sparkle is wearing off and
whose lives are beginning to resemble something in a Camus novel."
--PANK
"[A] searching and poignant work that deftly positions itself
between the unspeakable specificity of personal experience and the
disturbing surplus of fungible narratives in our online world."
--Cleaver
"This is a novel about noticing and ruminating rather than
assessing and concluding. The daily weather, interchanges with
passing acquaintances, views out the window, are accorded the same
attentive courtesy as love and pain. Life isn't seen as a grand arc
but as one thing after another, second by second. The book offers
each moment, each sentence equably and leaves us to decide what is
important and how." --Star Tribune
"Funny, intelligent, and sensual, although also unsettled, Eleanor
is engaging from the onset and a welcoming new female voice,
proving Moschovakis has the potential to become an accomplished
novelist. Recommended for most fiction readers." --Library
Journal
"By turns funny, melancholic, and provocative, Anna's novel undoes
and remakes the conventions of realist fiction through repetition
and compression of time . . . It is 'luminously ordinary' in its
progression, where profound shifts are as small as a postcard
written or a hand touched." --BOMB
"Moschovakis has outdone herself with Eleanor; it reveals all the
emptiness behind our collective aspirations and makes me want to
slow down and speed up all at once, empty and fill myself, perform
and be true. It exists in a place of contradictions, just like we
all do, and it feels like there's no better literary mirror into
which we should all gaze right now." --Nylon
"Moschovakis is in search of a way of presenting a woman's life
that is not expressed solely through family and bonds with
others--that rebuffs inherited conventions while acknowledging that
women are still labouring their way through the mare's nest
chaotically erected by patriarchy." --Frieze
"In narrating the twisting, intersecting plots by which Eleanor,
the novelist, and Aidan move from disconnection to connection, and
probably back to disconnection again, Moschovakis has created a
novel of great strength and flex. Much as it bends and twists and
gyres, it does not break, in fact only accumulates more tensile
strength from the motion, just as, one hopes, we all can do."
--Brooklyn Rail
"Her prose is marvelously rich with meaning, conceptually dense and
precise in phrasing." --Commonplace Review
"[A] carefully controlled, intelligent novel of ideas." --Literary
Hub
"Eleanor is a witty novel, studded with provocative literary and
philosophical references." --BBC
"Moschovakis' book seem[s] to arrange itself as we move, dreamlike,
through it, encountering a singular architecture of novel and
novelist that challenges us to read and think towards new
possibilities, new heights." --Arkansas International
"Moschovakis is a poet, and Eleanor is unmistakably a poet's novel,
alert to the textures of experience but relaxed in the pursuit of
plot." --Lambda Literary
"Moschovakis's characters are celebrations of the
information-collecting prowess of women, of the way in which her
characters 'weigh and consider' . . . an overwhelming amount of
data throughout each day." --Rain Taxi
"Anna Moschovakis takes the reader straight to the terrifying edge:
that moment where one ages out of youthfulness and begins to
flutter in the debris of middle living, flattened out by
technology, wild-goose chasing one's data. Yet, the deeper we look
into Eleanor's unsettledness, the more we see and the more hope we
find in her rhizomic wandering. This is a beautiful slow burn of a
novel." --Renee Gladman
"I don't know if I've ever read a book that captures so deftly what
it's like to live at a time of big data and mundane precarity,
where connections seem at once incredibly easy to form and
incredibly difficult to maintain. With keen insight and probing
humor, Anna Moschovakis vitally engages the ecosystem of art,
ideas, and narratives that make up the things that we call our
lives." --Alexandra Kleeman
"Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is brilliant,
inventive, funny, and full of sharp, keen insights. Anna
Moschovakis is one of the most invigorating invigilators of our
current moment, in all of its complexity and vexatious paradox. To
paraphrase its protagonist, this book is a performance that is
quality life--try now!" --James Hannaham
Praise for Anna Moschovakis:
"Deeply engaging. . . . Moschovakis sets philosophy, etymology, and
memory in motion to show that 'There are many ways to follow a
thought.'" --Publishers Weekly
"Anna Moschovakis is a great abstract poet in the sense that she
explores how formal procedures and found vocabularies and
grammatical structures delimit what we can express at a given
historical moment. But what makes her an indispensable writer is
how she is able--and through her we are able--to experience
questions of logical and linguistic relation as intensely lived, as
sites not only of critical reflection, but of love. This book
completes what I consider an essential poetic trilogy. It has
expanded my sense of how I, you, they, we might address one another
in the present tense of art." --Ben Lerner
"They and We Will Get into Trouble for This may have its lineage in
various traditions, but if we call it avant-garde or experimental,
it is to say that it provides new ways of looking at what poetry
can do at this very moment, broadening our perception of what was
always possible. In that sense, it is a rich and momentous book,
which should establish Anna Moschovakis as one of the most
important poets writing today." --Kenyon Review
"I enjoy and appreciate her philosophically bent poetry, her
austere use of language, and the sense of violence that charges her
poems." --San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Perhaps what is needed now is what this book supplies: beautiful
and fraught complexity. . . . Philosophy, anthropology,
linguistics, and other realms of theory are woven throughout the
book, which never creates an academic distance, but builds a path
toward intimacy." --Boston Review
"It feels smart, unsettled--at times evasive, and at others so
straightforward that it hurts." --American Poet
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