Spent Light

“Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose.” —Sarah Moss, The Guardian

A journalist who has seen horrors both at home and abroad retires into ordinary, middle-class life. Inheriting a toaster from a neighbor, she cannot help but view it with the same acuity she brought to her work. It is a homely and practical sort of thing, hardly worthy of a sonnet or still-life; yet, thinking of where its parts originated, who assembled it, and how it arrived at her door, might it not be considered as much a source of awe as any mountaintop or battlefield? Numbed as life may make us, can we not still be shown fear in a handful of breadcrumbs?

An atomized Mrs. Dalloway, Spent Light is a shocking, poetic, humorous, and frankly political journey through the unextraordinary objects and bodies filling up a comfortable suburban life: The living record of a mind “listening closely for what may be said by the things that use her to get their words out,” as Teju Cole writes in his foreword to this first American edition.