Dept. of Speculation

Jenny Offill is an American author of both children’s and adult literature. Before beginning her authorial career, Offill earned degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. She worked various jobs, including as a ghostwriter, a fact checker, and a medical transcriber, and also has a rich teaching background, including as an MFA program instructor at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, Columbia University, and Queens University of Charlotte. Offill also taught at Vassar College, Pratt University, and as the Writer-in-Residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. She also has editorial experience and most notably, co-edited two essay anthologies with Elissa Schappell.

Offill has published four children’s books and three full-length novels. Her children’s titles include 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore (2010), Eleven Experiments That Failed (2011), Sparky!, (2014), and While You Were Napping (2014). She has also had work published in the Paris Review, Electric Literature, and Significant Objects.

Offill published her first literary novel Last Things in 1999. The novel established Offill as a new voice on the literary stage and introduced her now iconic style. Last Things “mines an interval of childhood before the division of intellectual labor” and incorporates many of the same thematic elements of her subsequent two titles, Dept. of Speculation and Weather (2020) (“Last Things.” Jenny Offill). As Rick Moody said in his review of Last Things, the novel combines notions “of innocence, science, philosophy, mythology, bunk, wonder, and sorrow” into a “complicated and arresting” work of fiction (Offill). These same thematic and formal elements recur in Dept. of Speculation and Weather. In both, Offill’s curated arrangement of prose fragments works to create cohesive narratives that delve into the existential facets of the human experience. In Offill’s Q&A with Christina Fries, she said of her own stylistic subversions: “I have always liked compressed and fragmentary forms. I trace it back to my mind being blown by John Berryman when I was nineteen” (Fries, Cristina. “The Philosophical Novel Couched in a Tale of Marriage: Q&A with Jenny Offill.” ZYZZYVA).

Both Dept of Speculation and Weather have since risen to acclaim and received recognition on the literary stage. In 2014, Dept. of Speculation was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen/Faulkner Award, and the LA Times Fiction Award. Weather was shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and earned a place on 13 “Best Books of 2020” lists.

Offill is known for her inventive style and fiction subversions. Her novels are all deceptively simple on their surface—characters are often unnamed, and plot points come second to linguistic and formal play—but mine the depths of the human heart and mind. As the New York Times Book Review wrote of Dept. of Speculation, all three of Offill’s novels use “what you might call an experimental or avant-garde style of narration, one that we associate with difficulty and disorientation rather than speed and easy pleasure” (Gay, Roxane. “Bridled Vows.” The New York Times Book Review, 14 Feb. 2014). This “difficulty” effectively enacts the complexity of occupying one’s physical, spiritual, emotional, and psychological realms at once. Offill’s work is in conversation with other works of literary fiction like Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Rachel Cusk’s Outline, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, and R. O. Kwon’s Exhibit.