The Life of the Mind

“One of the wittiest, most deliciously farcical novels I’ve read in a long time.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR, Fresh Air

“Smallwood is . . . a delightfully stylish rambler; a conjurer of a heightened, carefully choreographed version of consciousness. Reading her is like watching an accomplished figure skater doing a freestyle routine.”—John Williams, The New York Times

“This book made me laugh out loud.”—The New York Review of Books

“[An] excellent debut.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Hilarious, recognizable, and helplessly wise—a perfect foil for its namesake.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

“Brilliant and pleasurable, funny and dark, cerebral and visceral—a must-read for the bleeding human survivors of the modern age.”—Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and Milk Fed
 
“Smallwood’s achievement is to describe, with humor and precision, the affective conditions—what Dorothy’s students might call the ‘vibe’—of a generation living at the end of the end of history but with very little sense of the future.”—Maggie Doherty, The Nation
 
“Impossibly good, fizzy like a freshly shaken soda can . . .  near-perfection. God, can Smallwood write.”—The Believer
 
“Wholly original, ultra-precise and very funny… the perfect book for anyone who—consciously or not—narrativizes their life, and sometimes gets filled with an overwhelming sense
of dread that they’ve lost the plot.”—Refinery29
 
“An intellectual page-turner that commands one’s attention completely from the first sentence to the final line. . . urgent, essential reading for our troubling times.”—Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Cool for America
 
“Smart, sharp, often very funny. . .  absolutely fearless.”—Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts