Weather

One

In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. Bucket of black paint, it means.

I spend some time pulling books for the doomed adjunct. He has been working on his dissertation for eleven years. I give him reams of copy paper. Binder clips and pens. He is writing about a phi­losopher I have never heard of. He is minor, but instrumental, he told me. Minor but instrumental!

But last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you re doing right now making money? it said.
 
The man in the shabby suit does not want his fines lowered. He is pleased to contribute to our institu­tion. The blond girl whose nails are bitten to the quick stops by after lunch and leaves with a purse full of toilet paper.

I brave a theory about vaccinations and another about late capitalism. Do you ever wish you were thirty again? asks the lonely heart engineer. No, never, I say. I tell him that old joke about going backward.

We don t serve time travelers here.
A time traveler walks into the bar.

On the way home, I pass the lady who sells whirl­ing things. Sometimes when the students are really stoned, they ll buy them. No takers today, she says. I pick out one for Eli. It s blue and white, but blurs to blue in the wind. Don t forget quarters, I remember.

At the bodega, Mohan gives me a roll of them. I admire his new cat, but he tells me it just wan­dered in. He will keep it though because his wife no longer loves him.

I wish you were a real shrink, my husband says.
Then we d be rich.
 

 
Henry s late. And this after I took a car service so I wouldn t be. When I finally spot him, he s drenched. No coat, no umbrella. He stops at the corner, gives change to the woman in the trash- bag poncho.

My brother told me once that he missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him.

JENNY OFFILL is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award) and Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen-Faulkner Award, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low-residency program at Queens University.

Genius. . . . Remarkable and resonant. . . . The right novel for the end of the world.
Los Angeles Times

Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible. . . . Luminous.
  The Boston Globe

Brilliant. . . . Offill s writing is often brisk and comic, and her book s format underlines her gifts. . . . Weather is her most soulful book. . . . Offill s humor is saving humor; it s as if she s splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan.
The New York Times Book Review

Darkly funny and urgent. . . . Offill is a master of the glancing blow.
NPR

"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."
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
 
Weather holds its own with the strongest examples of the new non-speculative climate fiction. It has the feel of a classic, the kind of book that future humans will read in order to figure out what people were thinking in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Glorious, dizzying, disconcerting and often laugh-out-loud hysterical.
USA Today

Time flies by in this wry story of a family librarian Lizzie, her classics buff husband, their son, and her brother, a recovering addict. Apocalypse (climate and otherwise) looms over the narrative, and yet it is funny and hopeful too.
Vanity Fair

[Weather] solidifies the author's place among the vanguard of writers who are reinvigorating literature.