The Gift

A sometimes funny, sometimes catastrophically sad story of performance art, ukuleles, dance, and our attempts and failures to make contact.

Praise for Barbara Browning:

"The Gift is a smart, funny, heartbreaking and often sexy delight of a novel that presses hard against the boundaries of where literary and artistic performances begin and end." —New York Times Sunday Book Review

"Deftly blending highbrow intellectual concerns with the informality of Facebook-era communiqués, Browning's newest is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

In the midst of Occupy, Barbara Andersen begins spamming people indiscriminately with ukulele covers of sentimental songs. A series of inappropriate intimacies ensues, including an erotically charged correspondence and then collaboration with an extraordinarily gifted and troubled musician living in Germany.

Barbara Browning teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She is the author of the novels The Correspondence Artist (winner of a Lambda Literary Award) and I'm Trying to Reach You (short-listed for The Believer Book Award). She also makes dances, poems, and ukulele cover tunes.