Virtual Event: Jenny Offill

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes novelist JENNY OFFILL for the paperback release of her latest, bestselling novel, Weather. She will be joined in conversation by CATHERINE LACEY, author of the acclaimed books Nobody Is Ever Missing, Certain American States, and Pew.

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About Weather

Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink—she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction—but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows.

A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.

Praise for Weather

"No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill." —Jia Tolentino

"Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes." —Sheila Heti

"Jenny Offill is the master of novels told in sly, burnished fragments . . . In Offill’s hands, the form becomes something new, a method of distilling experience into its brightest, most blazing forms—atoms of intense feeling . . . these fragments feel like: teeming worlds suspended in white space, entire novels condensed into paragraphs . . . What she is doing is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself . . . Weather transforms the novel of consciousness into a record of climate grief." —Parul Sehgal