A portrait of a woman stranded between her hometown and a new city, naivete and cynicism, welcoming togetherness and the nagging feeling of somehow being apart ... The woman lives on a cul-de-sac with her lover and her dog. She is smart and sensible. She buys groceries and goes to work. And she finds herself reliving her childhood memories while she waits--for what, she is not sure. In the tradition of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, The Ballad of Big Feeling reveals the mind of a woman perched before middle age and confronting the hidden contradictions and intricacies of everyday life. In the hands of an exciting new writer, Ari Braverman, it's a tale both spare and spacious, textured and poetic, frustrating and funny -- a delicately crafted volume that will linger in the mind of the reader long after they've put it down. It is, in short, a startling and assured debut.

"Brilliant, quietly explosive and slyly purposeful, like a controlled avalanche, The Ballad of Big Feeling rolls coolly downhill, gaining momentum and comic energy with every breathtaking page. It’s an auspicious debut.” —Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

“I can’t think of a young writer more exactingly hilarious and insightful than Ari Braverman. She writes short little prose bombs that unleash wit and insight and a kind of addictive strangeness, showing that she knows and sees our disturbing world and, amazingly, can bring it perfectly to life on the page.” —Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet
"The Ballad of Big Feeling dug itself right into my bones on the very first page, with a voice and precision that feels both intimately familiar and achingly strange. It’s the most aptly-named book I can think of: lyrical and rich, big-hearted and bold." —Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac

“An exquisitely observed debut—funny, horny, singular and sad—and gleaming with sentences that deliver welcome shivers of recognition. With big feeling and fine detail, Braverman pays radiant attention, and in so doing refashions the way a person might see the world.” —Hermione Hoby, author of Neon in Daylight

"The Ballad of Big Feeling is an artful book about what it means to be constrained--trapped, really--in an irascible, untidy form. Braverman’s debut proves— lyrically, forcefully—  that for all of our delusions, we are just mammals." —Lee Matalone, author of Home Making

“Braverman spins images that pull that perfect trick of making the familiar feel fresh [..] It’s a thrill to see that language can still be made to help us feel the rush of life anew.” —Lynn Steger Strong, New York Times Book Review

"Braverman’s debut novel is committed to exploding the interior voice that festers inside human loneliness . . .[she] poignantly makes an adventure out of the mundanity of life in a body. . .The roaring quietness of this book is one that is just right for this moment." —Believer Magazine
 "The Ballad of Big Feeling reveals, in intimate and surprising detail, the strangeness of the everyday. Braverman’s prose is associative, a feat of compression, characterized by a keen attention to affect, relationships, the emotional charge of objects, and the natural world." —BOMB Magazine

"An original, compelling, and enigmatic first novel." —Kirkus
"Braverman’s poetic, spare writing is perfect for the story, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions and feel their own feelings, especially in all the things left unsaid." —Booklist

Autorentext

Ari Braverman

Zusammenfassung
"Braverman spins images that pull that perfect trick of making the familiar feel fresh... It's a thrill to see that language can still be made to help us feel the rush of life anew." ---Lynn Steger Strong, New York Times Book Review

The woman lives on a cul-de-sac with her lover and her dog. She is smart and sensible. She buys groceries and goes to work. And she finds herself reliving her childhood memories while she waits--for what, she is not sure.

In the tradition of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, The Ballad of Big Feeling reveals the mind of a woman perched before middle age and confronting the hidden contradictions and intricacies of everyday life.

In the hands of an exciting new writer, Ari Braverman, it's a tale both spare and spacious, textured and poetic, frustrating and funny -- a delicately crafted volume that will linger in the mind of the reader long after they've put it down. It is, in short, a startling and assured debut.

Leseprobe
I.

A man’s voice swells out from his chest and throat like a bubble, enveloping the first row of seats and expanding until it seems to fill the theater.

“She’s having a seizure.” Again, louder, with more urgency. “She’s having a seizure!”

A girl slumps backward. Her head sinks awkwardly into her neck, jaw slack. But for her face, which is loose, it looks as though she’s doing a dance in her seat. Her shoulders wiggle wildly. The Chinese logograms on her sweatshirt zigzag back and forth, up and down.

A woman sits by her left side, opposite the man whose voice has become so loud.

The woman forces herself to pull the girl close. In the blue light from the man’s cell phone, the girl’s cheeks and forehead are ragged with acne. The woman puts her hands around the girl’s head, tilts it forward, and watches as saliva spools out of the girl’s mouth onto their legs. There is no foam around her lips, and the woman thinks, That is just another cliché.

The woman’s biceps ache, but the girl keeps vibrating. The woman’s lover is there, somewhere to her left with a tub of popcorn in his lap, but now she is part of a new duo: the girl and her own self in an inadvertent posture of care.

In the darkness, the woman can feel a tide of attention turning toward them. The shouting man is on his feet. He wants to know—is anyone a doctor?

Another man strides up the aisle on long legs.

“I’m a neurologist,” he says and steps into their row like a hero boarding a boat.

The movie has started. Discordant theme music fills the theater as the introductory credits roll.

The neurologist reaches across the woman’s body to touch the girl. The woman watches his big watch snag some of the girl’s hair while he thumbs back one eyelid and then the other. The doctor rubs his dry knuckles hard between the girl’s tiny breasts and demands she return to consciousness. Her face and his hands flicker as different shades of green, blue, gold, and gray in the light from the screen.

“Young lady! Young lady! Young lady!”

People cluster around the row, dotting the aisles and leaning over each other. No one offers any suggestions, but the woman can hear them murmuring beneath the noise of the score.

Slowly, the girl rises out of her seizure. Her expression is one of mild disbelief, as though a stranger has just stepped very hard on her foot. She swivels her whole body from left to right to look around. The woman pulls her close, to keep her still, and tucks the hair behind her ears.

The doctor snaps his fingers in the girl’s face.

“Where are your parents? Has this happened to you before? Young lady! Young lady! What is your name?”

But she cannot speak.

The houselights go up and the movie stops midscene. Onscreen the lead actor—a big star, the woman’s favorite—is caught midspeech, his mouth puckered into a fleshy rosette. The woman wishes that this afternoon had not veere…