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When the weather revolts, certainties dissolve and binaries blur as members of two reading groups converge at the intersection of theory and practice to reshape their lives, relationships, and reality itself.
In the latest novel from Anna Moschovakis, two reading groups, unofficially called Love and Anti-Love, falter amidst political friction and signs of environmental collapse. Participation offers a prescient look at communication in a time of rupture: anonymous participants exchange fantasies and ruminations, and relationships develop and unravel. As the groups consider―or neglect―their syllabi, and connections between members deepen, a mentor disappears, a translator questions his role, a colleague known as "the capitalist" becomes a point of fixation, and "the news reports" filter through in fragments. With incisive prose and surprising structural shifts, Participation forms an alluring vision of community, and a love story like no other.
"Novelist, poet, and translator Moschovakis delivers a brilliant and prescient story of an intellectual woman's engagement with two book clubs amid climate catastrophe and political strife...Moschovakis brings her fierce intelligence to bear in the structurally surprising and impeccably executed narrative. This is formal innovation at its finest." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Theory-driven, opaque, and formally experimental, the book risks abstraction that can be alienating...However, Moschovakis' take on what it means to form community in opposition to the expectations of hierarchy, anticipated outcome, or even narrative...feels timely, perhaps even prescient, in an era when the only thing that seems constant is the incontrovertible need for change. Densely intellectual, the novel forces an alert reader to reconsider what it means to participate in the very act of reading." - Kirkus Reviews
"Anna Moschovakis's narrator has been busy: boning up on the discourse of Love and Anti-Love; performing affective labor in the food service, mediation, and information industries; tugging gently at the nipple rings of a handsome capitalist; eating shrooms; exchanging cagey messages with a comrade whose gender remains tantalizingly suspended. Pronouns slip, and so do you, seduced in your turn by her direct address. Participation is a mysterious and sexy dive into the place where lust, altruism, and friendship converge." - Barbara Browning
"Participation is radically imagined and radically felt: a self-reflexive, intellectual, formally inventive novel that is also highly engaging and very funny. Anna Moschovakis is a brilliant and singular writer with a terrific feel for this cultural moment." - Dana Spiotta
"Anna Moschovakis's new novel Participation is a story of seeking an internal world that is very much grounded in the real world. It's a story of Love and Anti-love, of coherence and cohesion, of fate and free will, of pain and pleasure, of loss and love. Moschovakis takes us on an exploration of 'soft psychology' alongside 'hard politics,' 'soft feeling' alongside 'hard ideology,' and invites us to orient and reorient ourselves toward our 'comings-apart' and 'comings-together.' I hope you accept her invitation." - Poupeh Missaghi
This information about Participation 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.
Anna Moschovakis is the author of the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love and of three books of poetry, most recently They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This. Her translation of David Diop's At Night All Blood Is Black (Frêre d'âme) was awarded the 2020 International Booker Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, she has lived in New York since 1993 and currently makes her home in the Western Catskills.
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