Book Summary and Reviews of Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

  • Published:
  • Mar 2024, 160 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A lyrical debut novel from a musician and artist renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery.

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.

This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Strange and lyrical … Hval's writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence." —Publishers Weekly

"Hval is an artist of many questions—the ones she asks, and those she provokes in the listener. Apocalypse, Girl swerves from decipherable politics to recondite personal imagery. It's not a paraphrasable album, but it is a listenable one, its avant-garde tendencies held in check by Hval's beguiling voice." —New Yorker

"In Paradise Rot, Jenny Hval creates a parallel world that's familiar but subtly skewed. As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder." —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

This information about Paradise Rot 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.

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More Information

Norwegian musician and writer Jenny Hval has honed an intellectual and uncompromising view of politics and sexuality in her prose as well as in records that include Blood Bitch; Apocalypse, Girl; and Innocence Is Kinky. Paradise Rot is the first of her books to appear in English.

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