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PRAISE FOR

Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love

“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

“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.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Eleanor is a witty novel, studded with provocative literary and philosophical references.”

—BBC

“A novel about noticing and ruminating rather than assessing and concluding. The daily weather, interchanges with passing acquaintances, views out the window, are accorded the same attentive courtesy as love and pain. Life isn’t seen as a grand arc but as one thing after another, second by second. The book offers each moment, each sentence equitably and leaves us to decide what is important and how.”

—Star Tribune

“Funny, intelligent, and sensual, although also unsettled, Eleanor is engaging from the onset and a welcoming new female voice.”

—Library Journal

“By turns funny, melancholic, and provocative, Anna’s novel undoes and remakes the conventions of realist fiction through repetition and compression of time.… It is ‘luminously ordinary’ in its progression, where profound shifts are as small as a postcard written or a hand touched.”

—BOMB

“Moschovakis is in search of a way of presenting a woman’s life that is not expressed solely through family and bonds with others—that rebuffs inherited conventions while acknowledging that women are still labouring their way through the mare’s nest chaotically erected by patriarchy.”

—Frieze

“Moschovakis has created a novel of great strength and flex. Much as it bends and twists and gyres, it does not break, in fact only accumulates more tensile strength from the motion, just as, one hopes, we all can do.”

—The Brooklyn Rail

“Her prose is marvelously rich with meaning, conceptually dense and precise in phrasing.”

—Commonplace Review

“[A] carefully controlled, intelligent novel of ideas.”

—Literary Hub

“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

“[A] searching and poignant work that deftly positions itself between the unspeakable specificity of personal experience and the disturbing surplus of fungible narratives in our online world.”

—Cleaver

“Moschovakis’ book seem[s] to arrange itself as we move, dreamlike, through it, encountering a singular architecture of novel and novelist that challenges us to read and think towards new possibilities, new heights.”

—Arkansas International

“Moschovakis is a poet, and Eleanor is unmistakably a poet’s novel, alert to the textures of experience but relaxed in the pursuit of plot.”

—Lambda Literary