You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Description

'Single White Female as scripted by Miranda July' Observer A young woman called A lives with a young woman called B. B is becoming more and more like A: wearing her clothes, using her make-up. If A's boyfriend, C, likes A because A is A, but now B is the same is A, where does that leave A?

Alexandra Kleeman is a Staten Island-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and the winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in Harper's, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska. She is the author of the debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (Harper, 2015) and Intimations (Harper, 2016), a short story collection.

'An existential thriller written in prose that points the way to the future. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is as good a debut as I've ever read' Zadie Smith 'A disturbing, super-smart mystery' Daily Mail 'Strange, entertaining ... a clever satire on the naval-gazing horrors of contemporary life' Financial Times 'Weird and wonderful' Metro 'Kleeman tackles zeitgeist female themes of wellness, orthorexia and individualism with a sharp and original voice. Most potent is her uncanny fascination with the body, which leaves you feeling totally off-kilter with your own' Sunday Times 'Absurd and brilliant ... exalts in inventive, visceral language' Daily Telegraph 'Alexandra Kleeman's debut tackles gender dynamics; advertising; our relationship with food, and ponders what it means to be a woman living in a world obsessed with how the female body looks' Psychologies 'Destined to be one of the most talked about books this year' Reader's Digest 'Everyone knows we inhabit a woozy landscape of flatness, repetition and irregular bodies, and here at last is its hyper-contemporary description. Alexandra Kleeman possesses a new tone - comical, malignant and addictive' Adam Thirlwell 'Thomas Pynchon. David Foster Wallace. Don de Lillo. Haruki Murakami ... No one seems to have considered what a feminine equivalent might be. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine provides the answer' Emerald Street 'The next voice of a generation' Elle