There’s an encouraging, matter-of-fact drumbeat to Ives’s prose.This is a work of art that feels like a barely contained explosion.” -Nina Renata Aron, Los Angeles Times “Brilliantly berserk. Ives is capable of virtuosic control - there are at least 10 different kinds of writing in this book, and all are carried off so masterfully it’s almost frightening.Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives’s latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, can carry. It’s about one person on one evening, reckoning with heartbreak-a story that, to be fully told, unexpectedly requires many others, from the history of botulism to an enigmatic surrealist prank.

With unflinching precision, Life Is Everywhere captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. Erin isn’t sure what she’s doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she’s needed all along. Her bag contains two manuscripts she’s written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who’s recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Her husband has just left her and meanwhile her keys are in her coat, which she abandoned at her parents’ apartment when she exited mid-dinner after her father-once again-lost control.Įrin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. It’s an unseasonably warm Thursday in November and Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment.

So she dragged along in a spiral, trusting to this form.

Everywhere book