No One Is Talking About This

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Despite the title, or perhaps because of it, I cannot stop telling people about this book. No One Is Talking About This is so deeply affecting and speaks so immersively to “now” — being both a love letter to and an indictment of our digital lives — that I can’t decide if I want all fiction to be like this from now on or nothing to be like it ever again. I spent the first half laughing aloud. At times, I felt like I was reading a modern Debord — The Society of the Spectacle with a Twitter account. Be forewarned however, the transition from delightfully weird experiments with form into a second half that quietly and intimately details family tragedy may leave you openly weeping. I am deeply grateful that such writing exists. Recommended By Sarah R., Powells.com

Patricia Lockwood does some of my favorite writing — precise, weird, laugh-out-loud funny, and emotionally resonant. No One Is Talking About This is a phenomenal novel for everyone who interacts with the Internet, and everyone thinking about what it means to exist as a person. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com

From “a formidably gifted writer” (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the Internet?

As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms “the portal,” where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats — from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness — begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal’s void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. “Are we in hell?” the people of the portal ask themselves. “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?”

Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: “Something has gone wrong,” and “How soon can you get here?” As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

“An insightful — frequently funny, often devastating — meditation on human existence online and off.” Kirkus (Starred Review)

“A furiously original novel.” Jia Tolentino

“I really admire and love this book. Patricia Lockwood is a completely singular talent and this is her best, funniest, weirdest, most affecting work yet.” Sally Rooney

Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a New York Times Notable Book, and the memoir Priestdaddy. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and The London Review of Books. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas.