A missing laptop, a critic, a sojourn in communal living - Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a bracingly intelligent examination of grief, autonomy, aging, desire, information overload, and the condition of being a thinking and feeling inhabitant of an often unthinkable, numbing world. Anna Moschovakis’s debut novel bristles with honesty, humor, and the hungers that propel us to revise and again revise our lives.

About the author

Anna Moschovakis’s books include They and We Will Get into Trouble for This, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (winner of the James Laughlin Award), and English translations of Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, and Bresson on Bresson. She is a longtime member of the Brooklyn-based publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and cofounder of Bushel, a collectively run art and community space in the Catskills. This is her first novel.

Reviews

"Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets itself the task of asking the big questions - What am I? What was I? What will I be? - in a style that evokes Lispector and Camus but with the self-referential and weary globalism of the current milieu. A consummately accomplished novel. A worthy treatise on the now." (Kirkus, starred review)

"Performance art in print." (Publishers Weekly)

"A brilliant, visceral, sensual examination of the condition of being a woman, and the inherent struggles related to identity and authority that exist for all of us." (Nylon)

"Anna Moschovakis has done something remarkable." (Los Angeles Review of Books)

"Moschovakis’s novel is braided and experimental, yet it looks for illumination in the plainspoken and the authentic." (Wall Street Journal)