of Speculation only contains the beginning of one letter. But despite the cover and the title’s namesake (the return address that the narrator and her husband used when they wrote to each other), Dept. Perhaps the jacket’s design confronts the age of Amazon, in which readers primarily receive books through the mail. The book is packaged like a letter-the title is printed on a stamp which protrudes from the cover, and the words “A Novel,” in the top-left corner, are styled like a postmark. of Speculation, the reader is made to consider the epistolary novel in the age of the internet. Like Jorge Luis Borges, who, according to Barth, “confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work,” Offill confronts the age of new media by writing a novel-cum-online journal, in which the chronological details of the narrator’s personal life are interspersed with non-narrative text: self-described “fun facts,” “general notes,” “bits of poetry,” proverbs, and Internet memes. of Speculation, Offill, who also writes children’s books, chooses a young mother to narrate the story, but it is the way she tells it that is mysterious, if not eccentric. Her first novel, Last Things, tells the story of an eight-year-old girl whose mother is a mystery. of Speculation, a new novel that contemplates marriage and motherhood in Brooklyn, New York, Jenny Offill establishes herself as the latter-a writer who successfully reinvents her craft. In his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” John Barth outlines three types of artists: the technically old-fashioned artist, the technically up-to date non-artist, and the technically up-to-date artist.

Dept of speculation by jenny offill