![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “There are little signs everywhere in the library now that say BREATHE! BREATHE!” she notes. It’s not hard to trace the impact of library wandering on Offill’s fiction – not least because in her third novel, Weather, her narrator, Lizzie, works in a university library in Brooklyn. Of Speculation was loved by readers and praised by writers for blowing open the possibilities of the novel. An experimental story about marriage, creative hunger and loneliness, fizzing with comedy and sorrow, Dept. “It’s probably the closest I come to a religious ritual in my life, this library wandering,” Offill explained, in an interview with Foyles bookshop around the time her second novel Dept. She will wander around a library – “preferably a second-rate university library, with out-of-date reference books” – opening up random volumes, searching for something that “pings”, some snippet or fact that is “beautiful or momentous”. She has even come up with her own game, which she calls Library Roulette. ![]() The US writer has declared herself a “fan” of the musician’s Oblique Strategies cards, which feature prompts such as: “Use an old idea” “Ask your body” and “Work at a different speed”. Jenny Offill, like David Bowie, Talking Heads and Coldplay before her, has credited Brian Eno with improving her artistic process. ![]()
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