Media Reviews

Washington Post Offill is in total control here, and all the asides, jokes and Q&As reflect the fraying state of Lizzie’s mind as her concerns over the climate crisis, the Trump administration, pernicious algorithms and other man-made threats intensify...Lizzie never succumbs to hopelessness. Neither does Offill. Weather is too sharp a book to allow for pessimism or apathy.

The Guardian Reading Weather made me grind my teeth at night, just like its narrator – but it is certainly a brilliant exemplar for the autofictional method. Offill pulls us in close in order to make us worry about things outside us; mirrors the self to show us what we are selfishly ignoring.

New York Times Offill’s writing is shrewd on the question of whether intense psychic suffering heightens your awareness of the pain of others, or makes you blind to it...[her] fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun. In Dept. of Speculation, that white-hot core was the heartbreak of domestic collapse. In Weather, the collapse exists on a scale at once broader and more abstract: the end of the world itself.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) Lizzie's apocalyptic worries are bittersweet, but also always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Clever and seductive...the "weather" of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor. Offill is good company for the end of the world.

Booklist (starred review) Revelatory...Offill, who will delight fans of Lydia Davis and Joy Williams, performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from "tipping into the abyss."

 Ocean Vuong This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy.

 Ben Lerner Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It's this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present.

 Jia Tolentino No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill.

 Sheila Heti Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes.

Reader Reviews

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