In Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she implicates everyone she meets in her quest to pin down where exactly her own life went wrong. Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma – real or imagined – of everyone around her, and her quest to escape from her past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it. Serious and wise yet written with a delirious velocity, Offseason marks the arrival of a fiercely original literary talent.
