Gift

A ';winning and expansive novel' that ';describes one woman's intimacies with lovers, strangers, culture and ideas, and family and friends' (Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick). In the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a writer and academic from New York named 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. ';All this might seem like so much postmodern hot air, but the narrator has an exceptionally graceful page presence: loony and profound, vulnerable and ingenuous, Barbara acts to unify the book's central concerns, giving its intellectual flights of fancy a palpable human pulse. Maybe nothing in this book is exactly what it seems. But the sadness, at least, is real' (Publishers Weekly, starred review).