Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

Praise for Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

“A formidable one-woman show … Bennett allows the reader to sit in the house with her … without unctuousness or hypocrisy. And what an engrossing house it is.”-The New Yorker

“Good old-fashioned modernist fun… The novel contains many … moments of almost febrile power, rendered in prose both gorgeous and a little unnerving. To call Big Kiss, Bye-Bye entertaining would be to do an injustice to its discomfiting depth, but reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times Book Review

“Utterly original … among the most rapturous pieces of writing about desire that I’ve ever read.”–The Star Tribune

“A work of extraordinary subtlety. . .Bennett displays her characteristic aversion to identikit templates of feeling and desire that distort the real emotional complexity of our attachments and aversions to other people, and especially those people who have most profoundly shaped our inner lives. . .Its visceral and unerringly convincing depictions of sexual feeling. . . capture inexpressible intensities of experience.”–Financial Times

“A writer of great linguistic inventiveness…Bennett’s novel probes the ways our experiences of love and sex are simultaneously influenced by both generalities and particularities: by societal trends and by ourselves as individuals.” –The Atlantic

“A striking novel about a writer’s retreat into solitude in the aftermath of a love affair … Bennett ranges freely in register and tone, from passionate desire evocative of Ulysses’s Molly Bloom to a measured treatise on violence in cinema…. An intellectual tour de force.” –Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“The speaker’s exquisite sensibility, and her assured sense of her own perceptions, provides a throughline for the pastiche of scenes, dreams, and conversations that make up this book.… [It] reminds us that the goal of art is sometimes to see clearly and specifically what is there to be seen, with no duty to dictate its progress or its outcome. A languorously unfurling novel that rewards the reader’s attention and time.” –Kirkus

“Both intimate and introspective, this novel’s interiority and deployment of a strong stream of consciousness narrative amplify the narrator’s loneliness and losses. Bennett’s descriptive prose attends more to her narrator’s emotional state of mind rather than a plot or actions, as it combs the divide between memory and experience. Recommended.” – Library Journal