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by Alexandra Kleeman
A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and connectedness in the age of environmental collapse and ecological awakening - a darkly unsettling near-future novel for readers of Don DeLillo and Ottessa Moshfegh.
East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second.
In this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.
"Kleeman's ranging and ambitious latest (after Intimations) imagines a climate-ravaged near-future California...While a few plot twists are telegraphed, the action is propulsive and entertaining even as the horrors of climate change smolder around every corner. Readers will be captivated by this intelligent, rip-roaring story." - Publishers Weekly
"While some readers might find the novel overly conceptual, it's undeniably fun to watch Kleeman juggle genre, from mystery to domestic drama, from cli-fi to ghost story. An admirably eclectic take on environmental dystopia." - Kirkus Reviews
"Throughout, Kleeman writes expressively about place and the manifold ways our lives are shaped by our imperiled environment, foregrounding the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change and its attendant anxieties." - Vulture
"Because this is an Alexandra Kleeman novel, none of it goes where you think it's going to, but it's all so wildly entertaining and beautifully written that it really doesn't matter where you end up." - Literary Hub
"Alexandra Kleeman expertly conjures California noir filtered through the ambient and not-so-ambient apocalypse." - Emma Cline
"With this novel, Alexandra Kleeman confirms her place as one of the major writers of her generation. Reading it is like looking at a familiar room through warped glass: What you perceive is distorted and unsettling while remaining curiously beautiful." - Esmé Weijun Wang
"Something New Under the Sun is a richly rendered ecological novel, characterized not only by how it sets the landscape but also by the fact that the landscape is quite often allowed to run the show. Kleeman is phenomenal when it comes to place writing. Like many of the characters in her book, I got lost inside her scene-setting, arid and wild, happy to let her drive me wherever her genius brain thought we should go. Kleeman is at her very best here. This is a book I'll be thinking about for years to come." - Kristen Arnett
"A magnificent and stunning novel, by turns hilarious, satirical, moving, and so very, very much what we need in these uncertain times." - Jeff VanderMeer
This information about Something New Under the Sun 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.
Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among other publications, and her other writing has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Tin House, n+1, and the Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is the winner of the Berlin Prize and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a Rome Prize Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Staten Island and teaches at the New School.
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