Dept. of speculation : a novel
(Playaway Audiobook)

Issued on Playaway.

Title from container.

"LIGHT."

"HD."

Release date supplied by publisher.

Previously released by Dreamscape Media LLC, ℗2014.

One set of earphones and one AAA battery required for playback.

Read by the author.

Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes--a colicky baby, bedbugs, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions--the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it, as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.