Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I've read before. If I tell you that it's funny, and moving, and true; that it's as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1896, will you please simply believe me, and read it?

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?

She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.