Worry

So deliciously and expertly existential. To the point where I've begun noting every minutia of my day like they're somehow new and strange and connected and everything is an opportunity and nothing matters anymore and I want to hate that but it's kind of freeing and why am I desperately wanting to pick fights with anti-vax moms on Instagram? Recommended By Stacy W., Powells.com

Frances Ha meets No One Is Talking About This in a debut that follows two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity — a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood.

It's March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold — anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed — has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she'd marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Then the hives that've plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules's uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls' mother, a newly devout Messianic Jew, starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules's online mommies. Jules, halfheartedly struggling to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly comes to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. And Amy Klobuchar might have rabies. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, a disastrous trip home to Florida forces Jules and Poppy — comrades, competitors, constant fixtures in each other's lives--to ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they'll spend them together or apart.

Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.

"Alexandra Tanner's Worry is a furiously funny, delirious anxiety spiral of a book — a novel of ideas with a bad case of insomnia, written in a voice that is brilliant and electric. Poppy and Jules are a modern-day Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for the endless scroll of life to make sense. And what wonderful company they are: the detritus of their tangents and distractions coalesces into blistering prose that barrels through the narcissism of daily life, landing somewhere startling, original, and true." — Hilary Leichter, author of Temporary and Terrace Story

"[A] mordant debut...comical and savage...With unflinching honesty, Tanner captures the claustrophobia of 21st-century young adulthood." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Worry is exacting and hilarious, the startling, familiar shock of seeing your own slightly warped face reflected back to you when your iPhone dies from hours of scrolling. I haven't shut up about this book and I don't think I will for the forseeable future." — NYLON

Alexandra Tanner is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She is a graduate of the MFA program at The New School and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and The Center for Fiction. Her writing appears in The New York Times Book Review, Gawker, and Jewish Currents, among other outlets. Worry is her first novel.