Couverture / Jaquette

Praised by the New York Times Book Review as “a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation,” Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, and Tom Perrotta. In her second book, a collection of twelve stories irresistibly seductive in their strangeness, she explores human life from beginning to end: the distress of birth into a world already formed; the brief and confusing period of “living” when we understand what is expected of us and struggle to do it; and, finally, the death-y period, when we sense everything is winding down and that it will conclude only partially understood, at best.

The title Intimations is taken from one of the stories but is also a play on Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”—in this case it’s not clear exactly what is being intimated, only that it’s nothing so gleaming and good as Immortality. At once familiar and mysterious, these stories have an eerie resonance as the characters find themselves in new and surprising situations. An unnamed woman enters a room with no exit and a ready-made life; the disappearance of people, objects, and memory creates an apocalypse; the art of dance is used to try to tame a feral child; the key to surviving a house party lies in knowing the difference between fake and real blood.

Note biographique

Alexandra Kleeman has written for the New Yorker, Harper's, Paris Review, Zoetrope, Tin House, VOGUE, and n+1. She received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She was the 2016 winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, and lives in New York.

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