Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published May 2018
288 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
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.
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.
"Starred Review. In her first novel, essayist, poet, and Twitter-star Broder (So Sad Today, 2016; Last Sext, 2016) wraps timeless questions of existence - those that gods and stars have beseeched to answer for millennia - in the weirdest, sexiest, and most appealing of modern packaging. Brilliant and delightful." - Booklist
"Starred Review. A fascinating tale of obsession and erotic redemption told with black humor and biting insight." - Kirkus
"Broder makes her merman a more complex and believable character than most romantic heroes; her novel is a consistently funny and enjoyable ride." - Publishers Weekly
"This anticipated first novel from poet/essayist Broder is hilariously narrated…Those who take the plunge will be rewarded with a wild ride from a narrator whose sardonic outlook reveals profound truths about the nature of the self." - Library Journal
"The Pisces is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, with a keenly satirical eye towards our culture of therapy and recovery. It also features a bunch of lady-and-fish sex, which is apparently having a moment." - Vulture.com, "10 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Spring"
"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
"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
"No one writes about love like Melissa Broder, who captures the feverish obsession with both the lover and the self in hilarious, mesmerizing detail. I scarfed The Pisces in handfuls, surprised and delighted by every inventive detail and compelled by the lucid insights and chillingly familiar compulsions of the narrator." - Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
"A peerless combination of heartbreak and horniness, this novel's journey through the surreal throes of desire is a trip you'll want to take again and again. Broder's wit, vulnerability, and brilliance make me delirious with gratitude. What manic pleasures, perfectly rendered in a naked confessional voice, await you. It's impossible not to read (and revere) this book obsessively." - Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love
"The Pisces has everything – devastating honesty about love, intimacy and loneliness, tonally perfect writing, propulsive plotting, laugh out loud hilarity, and genuinely hot sex with a merman." - Emily Gould, author of Friendship
"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
This information about The Pisces was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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