The Pisces
Hogarth (Verlag)
978-0-525-57438-5 (ISBN)
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LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
"Bold, virtuosic, addictive, erotic - there is nothing like The Pisces. I have no idea how Broder does it, but I loved every dark and sublime page of it." -Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika's home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety - not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection.
Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy's understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.
Melissa Broder is the author of the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She writes the "So Sad Today" column at Vice, the astrology column for Lenny Letter, and the "Beauty and Death" column on Elle.com. She lives in Los Angeles.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE PISCES:
"Funny and dark, vicious and tender, The Pisces is a sexy and moving portrait of a woman longing for connection and pleasure in our strange and alienating world. I can't stop thinking about it."-Edan Lepucki, author of Woman No. 17
"The characters in The Pisces are so finely drawn and palpably real. These are some of the most real, relatable merman sex scenes I have ever read in any book."-Megan Amram, TV Writer and author of Science...For Her!
"The Venice Beach of The Pisces is familiar at first, but it quickly transforms into a new place in which fantasy can become reality overnight. I love how Melissa Broder navigates the anticipation of lust, the consequences of love, the lure of self-destruction, and the indecision between what seems right and what seems crazy. This book is for anyone that's wondered where their longing will take them next."-Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else
"I've long been a Melissa Broder fan but I had no idea a fabulist novelist lived in her too. I've never quite read anything like the surreal merman romantic comedy that is The Pisces! Broder has always been a simultaneously out-of-this-world & very-much-in-this-world poet/comic, so it's a wild delight to watch her transition to modern-day mythologist. Sappho and Tinder, mermaid porn and nervous breakdowns, the banal and the bananas gloriously litter this uncanny marvel that is pretty impossible to put down."-Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick: A Memoir and the novels The Last Illusion and Sons & Other Flammable Objects
"Starting with Sappho and ripping through the Los Angeles lovelorn, this exquisite story of romantic obsession deftly blends existential terror with sexy surrealism for a one-sitting absolute thrall. This book has my number so hard, I'm waiting for its midnight texts."-Amelia Gray, author of Isadora
"Melissa Broder has officially written the modern myth: a hilarious, surreal tale of addiction and academia, depression and desire, mania and melancholy. Through the eyes of our merman-obsessed anti-heroine, we become attuned to both the poignancy and pointlessness of the human experience-from illusory ambition to unruly erotic fantasy. (Broder writes sex like no one else I've read.) The Pisces will have you LOL-ing while you're longing while you're cringing while you're philosophizing-this is what it feels like to exist, and to attempt love, in the deluded torpor that is our time."-Molly Prentiss, author of Tuesday Nights in 1980
"By fearless and perverted, full of desolation and of hope, The Pisces is a novel that delves head on into the many dark, absurd facets of human connection and coping in search of meaning and comes back bearing fantastic flashes of a twisted rom-com surreality only Melissa Broder's gemstone-studded brain could conjure up."-Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year
PRAISE FOR SO SAD TODAY:
"These essays are sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous. They reveal so much about what it is to live in this world, right now."-Roxane Gay
"If Melissa Broder weren't so fucking funny I would have wept through this entire book. Love, sex, addiction, mental illness and childhood trauma all join hands and dance in a circle, to the tune of Melissa's unmatched wit and dementedly perfect take on this terrifying orb we call home."-Lena Dunham
"At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays (named for Broder's popular Twitter handle) is as raw as it is funny."―Cosmopolitan
"If her Twitter account is a darkly comic 'creative way to distract myself and cope,' as [Melissa Broder] describes it, then her essays are deeper excavations of that same mind."―Elle
"Her writing is deeply personal, sophisticated in its wit, and at the same time, devastating. SO SAD TODAY is a portrait of modern day existence told with provocative, irreverent honesty."―Nylon
"Instead of supersizing her angsty tweets,
Chapter 1
I was no longer lonely but I was. I had Dominic, my sister's diabetic foxhound, who followed me from room to room, lumbering onto my lap, unaware of his bulk. I liked the smell of his meaty breath, which he didn't know was rancid. I liked the warmth of his fat belly, the primal way he crouched when he took a shit. It felt so intimate scooping his gigantic shits, the big hot bags of them. I thought, This is the proper use of my love, this is the man for me, this is the way.
The beach house was a contemporary glass fortress, sparse enough to remind me nothing of my life back home. I could disappear in a good way: as if never having existed, unlike the way I felt I was disappearing all fall, winter, and spring in my hot, cluttered apartment in Phoenix, surrounded by reminders of myself and Jamie, suffocating in what was mine. There are good and bad ways of vanishing. I wanted no more belongings.
On the second-story deck of the beach house I escaped the hell of my own smelly bathrobe, wearing one of the silk kimonos my sister had left behind. I fell asleep out there every night, tipsy on white wine, under the Venice stars, with my feet tucked under Dominic's gut, belonging to nothing familiar. I felt no pressure to fall asleep, and so, after nine months of insomnia, I was finally able to drift off easily every night. Then at three a.m. I would wake gently and traipse to the bed with the Egyptian cotton sheets, kicking my legs all over them in celebration, rolling around and touching my own skin as though I were a stranger touching someone foreign, or cradling the big back of the dog to my front to die to the world for another eight hours. I might have even been happy.
And yet, walking on Abbot Kinney Boulevard one night at the end of my first week there, passing the windows of the yuppie shops-each their own white cube gallery-I saw two people, a man and a woman, early twenties maybe, definitely on a first or second date, and I knew I still wasn't okay. They were discussing intently where they should go to eat and drink, as though it really mattered. He had an accent, German, I think, and was handsome and fuckable: hair close-cropped and boyish, strong arms, an Adam's apple that protruded and made me think of sucking on it.
The woman was, as the undergrads at the Arizona university where I worked as a librarian might say, a butterface.
For nine years I had been at Southwest State in the dual lit and classics PhD program. Somehow, miraculously, despite having not yet turned in my thesis, they hadn't withdrawn my funding. In exchange for thirty hours of work per week in the library, I was housed in a below-market-rent apartment off-campus and received a yearly stipend of $33,000. I was supposed to be working on a book-length project entitled "The Accentual Gap: Sappho's Spaces as Essence." This year, as a result of my tardiness, I'd been appointed a new advisory committee, comprised of both the classics and English department chairpersons, and I was no longer flying under the radar.
In March, I had met with them at a Panera Bread, where they delivered the news over paninis-Napa almond chicken salad for the English chair in her coffee-stained Easter sweater and tuna salad for the classics chair, his nose swollen with rosacea-that I was to have a full draft completed by the fall semester or my funding would be pulled and I would be out. So far, this had not made me hustle any faster.
It wasn't that I no longer felt impassioned by Sappho. I did, or sort of did, as much as you can feel impassioned by anyone you have lived with for nine years. But it had dawned on me around year six that the thesis of my thesis, its whole raison d'être, was faulty. In fact, it was not just faulty. It was total bullshit. But I didn't know how to fix it. So I'd just been riding it out.
The book operated under the notion that scholars always assumed a first-person speaker when reading
| Erscheinungsdatum | 21.04.2018 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 145 x 209 mm |
| Gewicht | 288 g |
| Themenwelt | Literatur |
| Schlagworte | Anxiety • Break-Up • dependency • Depression • Erotic • Group therapy • heartbreak • Humor • Los Angeles • Love • Mermaid • mermaid sex • merman • Novel • novel about a mermaid • novel about a merman • novel about anxiety • novel about depression • relationships • Sappho • Sex • therapy • tinder • West Coast |
| ISBN-10 | 0-525-57438-7 / 0525574387 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-525-57438-5 / 9780525574385 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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