Offseason With Avigayl Sharp

We’re glad to welcome Avigayl Sharp to The Wild Detectives to present her debut novel, Offseason! In Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong. Though she’s vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind. “Obscenely good and very funny.” —Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book “To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere—this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfills that promise, amply, and with art and wit.” —Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow “How does one describe a book as indescribably brilliant as Offseason? . . . It is profound and uproarious, exciting and thought-provoking, unafraid and original, genuinely dark and yet also genuinely joyful. You’ve never read anything like it.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book Don’t miss out and sign up to our newsletter

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We’re glad to welcome Avigayl Sharp to The Wild Detectives to present her debut novel, Offseason! In Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong. Though she’s vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends