
Dept. of Speculation
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Narrated by:
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Jenny Offill
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By:
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Jenny Offill
About this listen
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.
Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in this audiobook 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, 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.
With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last word.
©2022 Jenny Offill (P)2022 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Absorbing and highly readable...Offill has successfully met the challenge she seems to have given herself: write only what needs to be written, and nothing more. No excess, no flab. And do it in a series of bulletins, fortune-cookie commentary, mordant observations, lyrical phrasing. And through these often disparate and disconnected means, tell the story of the fragile nature of anyone’s domestic life.... Intriguing, beautifully written, sly, and often profound.” (Meg Wolitzer, NPR)
“Audacious.... Hilarious...Dept. of Speculation reveals a raw marital reality that continues to be expunged from the pervasive narrative of marriage.... Offill moves quickly and poetically over deeply introspective questions about long-term partnerships, parenthood, and aging.... From deep within the interiors of a fictional marriage, Offill has crafted an account of matrimony and motherhood that breaks free of the all-too-limiting traditional stories of wives and mothers. There is a complexity to the central partnership; Offill folds cynicism into genuine moments of love. It may be difficult to truly know what happens between two people, but Offill gets alarmingly close.” (The Atlantic)
“Breathtaking.... Reminiscent of Renata Adler’s Speedboat but with a less bitter edge...Dept. of Speculation charts the course of a marriage through curious, often shimmering fragments of prose.... Moves quickly, but it is also joyously demanding because you will want to keep trying to understand the why of each fragment and how it fits with the others.... Offill is a smart writer with a canny sense of pacing.... She deftly moves the novel forward with elegant shifts of point of view.” (The New York Times Book Review)
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Anthropologists in Love
- By David on 08-21-14
By: Lily King
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Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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Everything is baroque-en
- By Eric on 12-14-06
By: Mary Gaitskill
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My Sister, the Serial Killer
- A Novel
- By: Oyinkan Braithwaite
- Narrated by: Adepero Oduye
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures of her dinner to Instagram when she should be mourning her “missing” boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit. Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works.
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That’s it?!!!
- By Danni B. on 12-26-18
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The Night Watch
- By: Sarah Waters
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 18 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past - whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise, and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.
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A Captivating Tale of Resilience and War
- By Anonymous User on 12-27-23
By: Sarah Waters
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Earthlings
- A Novel
- By: Sayaka Murata
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth.
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Intriguing but disturbing
- By C. Parham on 01-01-21
By: Sayaka Murata
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Play It as It Lays
- A Novel (FSG Classics)
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis.
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Didion is a genius
- By Rogue415 on 04-09-25
By: Joan Didion
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
By: Joan Didion
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The Glass Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Emily St. John Mandel
- Narrated by: Dylan Moore
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors.
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Don't waste your time and money
- By Anonymous User on 03-26-20
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Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition)
- A Novel
- By: David Mitchell, Gabrielle Zevin
- Narrated by: Scott Brick, Cassandra Campbell, Kim Mai Guest, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite.... Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter....
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thoroughly enjoyed
- By Elizabeth on 01-05-08
By: David Mitchell, and others
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
- A Novel
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late 20s, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born - a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.
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Beautifully written, but painful.
- By NB on 06-10-19
By: Ocean Vuong
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The Friend
- A Novel
- By: Sigrid Nunez
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: Dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time.
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Dreadful and misleading...
- By Gail on 11-18-18
By: Sigrid Nunez
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Beautyland
- By: Marie-Helene Bertino
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she's different: she possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of earthlings.
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Unforgettable
- By Amazon Customer on 02-04-24
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The Vanishing Half
- A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)
- By: Brit Bennett
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern Black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: Their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for White, and her White husband knows nothing of her past.
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Soap opera material
- By Sheila S on 06-06-20
By: Brit Bennett
What listeners say about Dept. of Speculation
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- DLR
- 01-03-23
Sorprendentemente interesante
Sin nombres propios, Offill cuenta la historia de una mujer. Y de los q la rodean. Su boz interior habla sobre sus amores y el encuentro del q se volvería si esposo. La vida familiar. Las subidas y bajadas. Li bueno y lo malo q convierten esta historia en algo tan ordinario q se vuelve un reflector de la normalidad. Narración muy buena.
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- RNov2010
- 03-14-22
Not really a story
This reminds me of Virginia Woolf in a way. The stream of thoughts of the nameless narrator, the switching of tones by the reader. I would recommend it to those who are willing to listen to almost pure thought.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Rachel Sanchez
- 04-27-22
Fun facts!
Loved it! it had a journalistic feel to it that made it hard to stop listening to.
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- Amanda
- 05-22-23
Deadly narration.
This is a pretty well written book Re come fed by a number of friends that is utterly destroyed by the robotic performance/narration. I kinda want my audible money back to put toward a printed copy.
It is unlistenable.
Very rarely do authors make good narrators.
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1 person found this helpful
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- electricfool
- 06-17-23
Bourgeois whining
Absolutely insufferable--just a rich white woman navel gazing and feeling sorry for herself. No plot, unlikable characters with zero interesting traits, and an "autofiction" narration that basically serves as a thin veil for the emotionally stunted author to complain about her dull, privileged life.
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1 person found this helpful