![]() ![]() “Popkey’s unnamed narrator is intelligent and discerning, slightly discomfiting in the ruthlessness with which she interrogates herself and those around her. There is, in the held moment, a posture: a kind of performance that asks or rejects the reader’s judgment.” - Anne Enright, The New York Review of Books By telling a story (and by telling it beautifully), the narrator is in charge of her own weakness she can occupy both positions at once. “Like many of the works she cites, Popkey’s discussion about passivity is, itself, entirely controlled. The questions it asks are about how women make sense - or don’t, or can’t - of the ways they’ve been limited, controlled and intoxicated by male standards of desire, make reading “Topics of Conversation” as thrilling as being told a secret.” - Julie Buntin, The San Francisco Chronicle “Popkey doesn’t offer any answers about what to do with these relationships, or why the gravitational pull of such men is, for some, so strong. “If the feminist debates parse desire on a theoretical level, Popkey’s novel reveals where these analyses intersect with the more mundane, familiar kinds of self-analysis: Should I choose one direction or the other, act this way or that? She depicts what it feels like to exist, actually live, at that intersection, which can so often bring about paralysis.” - Sarah Resnick, The New Yorker The result is sure to spark conversation.” -Heller McAlpin, NPR “In this provocative debut, Popkey has gone deep inside the head of someone who is wired to make things hard for herself. The most we can do is listen to her story.” -Antonia Hitchens, The New York Times Book Review She doesn’t arrive at a totalizing, liberated endpoint. ![]() I liked being inside her mind it felt natural. “Popkey presents us with a shrewd record of the act of unflinchingly circling these amorphous notions of pain, desire and control, all the while quietly noting their clichéd contrivances in snarky, dark humor. Pick up Topics of Conversation at your local independent bookstore or order it from: Edgy, wry, shot through with rage and despair, Topics of Conversation introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist. The novel is composed almost exclusively of conversations between women–the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage–and careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life. Miranda Popkey’s first novel is about desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, guilt–written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism. ![]() For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill–a compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction ![]()
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