Offseason: 'Phenomenal' MADELINE CASH, author of LOST LAMBS

About the Book

A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood and George Saunders

'One of the sharpest and liveliest debuts of the decade' VULTURE

'Obscenely good and very funny' CATHERINE LACEY

'A startling fever dream of a novel' LUCY ROSE

'So smart, weird and eerie . . . I recommend everyone buy it when it comes out' MADELINE CASH

In Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town.

In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she implicates everyone she meets in her quest to pin down where exactly her own life went wrong.

Blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged, Offseason marks the arrival of a wild new literary talent.

'Indescribably brilliant . . . You've never read anything like it' ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

'A bonkers and beautifully written novel . . . Absorbing and original' NUSSAIBAH YOUNIS

'Yes, Offseason is hilarious, eccentric and gleefully mean-spirited, but just when you think you know what Sharp is doing, she will shatter your heart. I haven't read something so incisive, so slyly tender in years' LISA McINERNEY

'A narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar' MICHAEL CHABON

About the Author :
Avigayl Sharp's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta and McSweeney's, and has received support from Yaddo, the Granum Foundation and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize and a 2023-2024 writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Offseason is her debut novel. She is currently based in Germany.

Review :
So smart, weird and eerie A bonkers and beautifully written novel about family, frigidity and the world's most inappropriate crush on Iosif Stalin. Absorbing and original Ottessa Moshfegh meets Yorgos Lanthimos, Offseason simmers with wit and elegance. It's a startling fever dream of a novel. When Avigayl Sharp writes, it is impossible to look away How does one describe a book as indescribably brilliant as Offseason? It is no less than a contour map of one woman on planet Earth, from the innermost workings of her mind and soul to her unruly body to the hilarious and hostile world around her. It is profound and uproarious, exciting and thought-provoking, unafraid and original, genuinely dark and yet also genuinely joyful. You've never read anything like it An obscenely good and very funny debut about the black hole of building your identity around the worst things that have ever happened to you. Unhinged in the best way To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere-this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfills that promise, amply, and with art and wit I am a wholesale fan of Avigayl Sharp's fiction. Offseason, full of voice, reads like Sharp's been writing novels for years. Fierce, disciplined observations leap through this unforgettable story of departure and return in an America that has become unrecognizable even to the girls Sharp's narrator attempts to teach. Hilariously deadpan, mordantly sardonic, Offseason is a knockout debut Yes, Offseason is hilarious, eccentric and gleefully mean-spirited, but just when you think you know what Sharp is doing, she will shatter your heart. I haven't read something so incisive, so slyly tender in years A 'sexually frigid, spiritually sick and morally warped' PhD student tries her hand at teaching English at an all-girls boarding school on the coast. Trauma dumping ensues. As does a wayward lesson plan on Bleak House and the troubled childhood of Stalin. Offseason looks to be the ultimate barometer of twenty-first-century malaise and Gen Z grumbles. But will anyone be able to stop talking about it? This voicey debut novel from a Paris Review contributor announces its wit on page one. Our bone dry narrator's bound for a teaching gig at an all-girls boarding school. A creepy seatmate is squeezing her foot, but she's the sort to allow it. An observer of catastrophes, come what may Sharp's novel has traces of autofiction and a hint of Rachel Cusk. The prose sparkles, not least in the inventive imagery' One of the sharpest and liveliest debuts of the decade Intensely observant and ineffably askew. It's a funny, sad, discomfiting, unabashedly weird book that I inhaled and haven't managed to stop thinking about yet Sharp's deadpan debut reads like a gen Z update on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, playfully skewering modern literary tropes . . . a wryly funny portrait of an enervated psyche . . . Offseason skewers, simultaneously and with plenty of droll wit, several commonplace tropes in recent literary fiction: the pat complacency of the trauma plot; the gooey sentimentalism of the immigrant experience novel; the narcissism of autofiction; the heavy foregrounding of theme at the expense of texture . . . Offseason's narrative arc echoes that sense of futility - the novel builds to an elliptical anticlimax - but when the journey is this fun, the destination hardly matters