Offseason is narrated by a self-described ''sexually frigid, spiritually sick, and morally warped'' PhD dropout who arrives at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town to teach English. While manically lecturing her students about Charles Dickens''s Bleak House , she veers from her syllabus to highlight the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin, the impact of the Holocaust and the Soviet Union on her family, and the crucial distinctions between ephebophilia and pedophilia. Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma - real or imagined - of everyone around her, her quest to escape the past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it. Savage, hilarious and profound, it marks the arrival of a truly original literary talent.

Autorentext
Avigayl Sharp's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta and McSweeney's, and has received support from Yaddo, the Granum Foundation and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize and a 2023-2024 writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Offseason is her debut novel. She is currently based in Germany.

Klappentext

**'Obscenely good and very funny' Catherine Lacey

'You've never read anything like it' Elizabeth McCracken

'A knockout debut' Jessica Anthony
**

A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel following a young woman who takes a job at an all-girls boarding school in a small coastal town to teach English literature - and to try, desperately, to escape the trap that is herself.

In Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town. 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 implicates everyone she meets in her quest to pin down where exactly her own life went wrong.

Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing family. The past collides with the present - but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.

Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma - real or imagined - of everyone around her, and her quest to escape from her past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it.

Serious and wise yet written with a delirious velocity, Offseason marks the arrival of a fiercely original literary talent.

*'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 fulfils that promise, amply, and with art and wit'
Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow*

'Profound and uproarious, exciting and thought-provoking, unafraid and original'
Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of this Book

'Hilariously deadpan, mordantly sardonic'
Jessica Anthony, author of The Most**