Ducks, Newburyport

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WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZEANEWYORKERBEST BOOK OF 2019ANEW YORK TIMESNOTABLEBOOK OF 2019ATIMEMUST-READ BOOK OF 2019AWASHINGTON POSTNOTABLE WORK OF FICTION 2019ACHICAGO TRIBUNEBEST BOOK OF 2019AGLOBE & MAILBOOK THAT SHAPED 2019ABOOK RIOTBEST BOOK OF 2019ATIMESCRITICS TOP BOOK OF 2019ATORONTO STARTOP TEN BOOK OF 2019Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, Americas ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your sons toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing?With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness,Ducks, Newburyportlays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of Americas barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresyand a revolution in the novel.PRAISE FORDUCKS, NEWBURYPORTLucy EllmannsDucks, Newburyportoffers a radical literary form and voice. Dense to look at, challengingly epic, the novel is built around one Ohio housewifes monologue, flowing with dazzling lightness and speed. The detritus and maddening complexity of domesticity unfold in one breath, over a thousand pages. Shards of film plot and song collide with climate change anxiety; the terrors of parenting, healthcare and shopping lists wrestle with fake news and gun culture. The narrator reverberates with humour, wordplay and political rage. The writing resonates like a dissonant yet recognisable American symphony for massive forces, with riffs and themes folding back, proliferating, and gradually cohering. Its one long sentence occasionally breaks to simply describe a mountain lioness and her cubs: a meditation on nurture that will be wrapped into the violence of the ending. Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmanns daring is exhilarating as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.Booker Prize Judge, Joanna MacGregorLucy EllmannsDucks, Newburyportoffers a radical literary form and voice. Dense to look at, challengingly epic, the novel is built around one Ohio housewifes monologue, flowing with dazzling lightness and speed. The detritus and maddening complexity of domesticity unfold in one breath, over a thousand pages. Shards of film plot and song collide with climate change anxiety; the terrors of parenting, healthcare and shopping lists wrestle with fake news and gun culture. The narrator reverberates with humour, wordplay and political rage. The writing resonates like a dissonant yet recognisable American symphony for massive forces, with riffs and themes folding back, proliferating, and gradually cohering. Its one long sentence occasionally breaks to simply describe a mountain lioness and her cubs: a meditation on nurture that will be wrapped into the violence of the ending. Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmanns daring is exhilaratingas are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.2019 Booker Prize Jury CitationThis book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundryThe capaciousness of the book allows Ellmann to stretch and tell the story of one family on a canvas that stretches back to the bloody days of Western expansion, but its real value feels deeper it demands the very attentiveness, the care, that it enshrines. Parul Sehgal,New York TimesWritten as a single sentence stretching more than 1,000 pages, this remarkable 2019 novel thrums with life.New York TimesBrilliantly ambitiousAt times theres such fury to these ruminations that the book seems to shift into direct cultural critique; at other times it all seems simply part of the storyThe lioness offers a foil, a figure of natural instinct and maternal courage set against the narrators culturally determined fears and insecuritiesThis is a novel, but it is also, fundamentally, a very long and meaningful listas accumulative, as pointed, as death-addled, as joyous, as storied, as multitudinous and as large as life.Martin Riker,New York Times Book ReviewEllmann captures the pathos of the everyday, how one might use pie crusts and film synopses to dam in pain. She also allows the narrators avoidance to suggest a greater amnesia, an American reluctance to face its past and its ongoing brutalities. The narrator lives in a country whose mythic propositions hang in the same limbo as her run-on sentenceEllmanns commitment to compilation and description suggests a resistance to hierarchies. It also flickers with tenderness. The time and care that she lavishes on her narrator seem like their own form of political speculationthat every individual is owed an unending devotion, and that such devotion, applied universally, might change the fate of the world.New YorkerEffervescentas the book closes in on the thrilling and unexpected conclusion, the disparate strands tossed out at the novels onset gleam with importDucks, Newburyport directs us back to the language on the page, so we become hyper-aware of itEllmann has made a case that a richer, less regimented language leads to a more vibrant and capacious mind, and has thus crafted the entrancing Ducks, Newburyport into a celebration of all that words, and the minds they build, can contain.Chicago Review of BooksA sublime literary enactment of how guilt, grief, rage, regret, compassion, and every other emotion swirls and ebbs in unbalanced defiance of rational logicThe very form of Ducks, Newburyport is perhaps the ultimate expression of lifes absurd disproportionalityThe free-associative stream accumulates into a work of great formal beauty, whose distinctive linguistic rhythms and patterns envelop the reader like music or poetry. Equally, it forms a damning indictment on capitalist patriarchy that, in an extraordinary feat from a writer at the height of her powers, never veers within a mile of sanctimony or self-righteousness. If art is measured by how skillfully it holds a mirror up to society, then Ellmann has surely written the most important novel of this era. The Paris ReviewBreathlessly brilliant an extraordinary achievement of wit and imagination this isnt just one of the outstanding books of 2019, its one of the outstanding books of the century.The Irish TimesUlysseshas nothing on this Once you get going, youll be too absorbed to stop.CosmopolitanCould possibly turn out to be the most important novel of the decade ReadDucks, Newburyport. This is a novel for the idea of America today.Los Angeles Review of BooksEccentric and recursive, its language eschews modernisms tangled poetry for something more recognizably contemporary. The detritus of digital and popular culture is embedded, shard-like, in the mesh of the narrators ever-unspooling mindHer heroines anger burns cleanly, refusing the easy conflagration of self-righteousness. The cumulative effect is devastating. This is a powerful and deeply felt indictment of American moral failure, a fearful, dazzling bloom of conscienceThe narrative technique of Ducks, Newburyport is itself a kind of coping mechanism, a grand mimetic achievement. The novels length is, in the end, something of the point.The NationThere are novels, and then there are extraordinary novelstruly unique, one-of-a-kind, sui generisterms that are often used as clichs but I assure you not in Lucy Ellmanns case, regarding her eighth novel, Ducks, Newburyporta truly great American novel that catches our zeitgeist more accurately during the Trump years than anything else I have readEllmann has crawled into the horrifying times in which we live and written an explosive story that will engage you on every one of its 1000 pages.CounterPunchIts a book that quite restores our faith in the possibility of literary greatness while questioning what forms such greatness can or should take. It is certainly, in its humane range and weight, a Great American Novel. Is it any good? Oh my word, yes. Reading it at this point in times seems like an act of human solidarity, a commitment to the world of truth and reason. Literary ReviewBrilliant and addictiveThere have been comparisons to James JoycesUlysses, but Ellmann is in a class by herself.Associated PressReaders need not scoff this giant pie in one gulp. Sampled at regular intervals, it tastes sweeter. The sheer ingenuity of Ms Ellmanns wordplay, the fabulous profusion of her recipes, catalogues and inventories, from a freezers contents to confectionery brands, imbue every passage with fun as well as a sardonic poetry.EconomistDucks, Newburyportis a menacing novel, a masterpiece of precision and endurance. This is the sort of book youll pick up and be baffled for the first 10 or 20 pages, but by the 30th page, youll be home.ThrillistDucksis a technical masterpiece and kind of literary manifestoa staggeringly provocative work of genius.Toronto StarDucks, Newburyport is a complex book about a complicated time. It reads like an outpour of humanity beckoning to be heard.Electric LiteratureResplendent in ambition, humour and humanity a lifetime of memories hoarded and pored over, like the family heirlooms the narrator and her husband have inherited along with all the joy and desolation contained within them InDucks, NewburyportEllmann has created a wisecracking, melancholyMrs Dallowayfor the internet age.Financial TimesPerhaps the most intensely real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind Ive ever witnessed whatDucks[Newburyport] amounts to is one great trauma diagnosis for the entire countryIts a colossal feat.The SpectatorA book about a mothers love, but also about loss and grief, and anxiety dreams about Donald Trump, and despair about mass shootings It is also a catalogue of lifes many injuries and mishaps and of the simple joys and consolations of memory and imagination. [A] triumph.The GuardianEpic.Associated PressA jaw-dropping miracle.Library Journal(starred review)A remarkable portrait of a woman in contemporary America contemplating her own life and societys storm clouds brilliant.Publishers Weekly(starred review)Mesmerizing, witty, maximalista bravura and caring inquiry into Earths glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and the transcendence of love.Booklist(starred review)InDucks, Newburyportthe invisible expropriation of womens domestic labour is tied to the despoiling of the environment and the macho degradation of the public sphere. But this is to suggest the novel can be boiled down to one particular theme, when its entire premise refuses any kind of summary. In readingDucks,wonder gives way to frustration, which gives way to wonder again, until finishing becomes a kind of contemplative vigil an exercise in dedicationDucksis asking us to imagine what a total, unboundaried empathy with another person could feel like.New StatesmanThis is one of the most bonkers, but absolutely brilliant, novels I have ever readby turns poignant, funny, repetitive, poetic, banal and wisethis is a brave and bracing book for both author and publisher to have produced, and in the sheer commitment it demands of the reader is a brilliant antidote to the simplistic realm of clickbait, acronyms and sloganeering that the novel describes and critiques so well. Bravo!The TabletA wildly ambitious and totally unique masterpiece of the kind that doesnt frequently appear in contemporary fictionOnce or twice while reading a novel, you might encounter an image in passing that suddenly knocks you out of the book and into a dreamy state, a little detail that jumps out at you and consumes your attention for a moment. This happens so often in Ducks that reading the book can be like a collection of immediately interesting objects, like that specific kind of American home so stuffed with objects that every moment is one of discovery. The material culture of American life is splayed across these pages.Michigan DailyInnovative, intelligent, and simply extraordinary.Lit HubA wildly ambitious and righteously angry portrait of contemporary America.The ObserverIt is a soaring example of how a gifted writer can spin one sentence into a complete, immersive story.Financial TimesAs deep and broad and beautiful and American as the Grand Canyon. Because this torrent spills from the mind of one ordinary woman (an Ohioan, a wife, a mom, a baker of pies), because shes hilarious, because her doubts and deprecations, her fondnesses and fears, are so mundane and relatable, because she exists as one of the truest-to-life fictional characters you could ever hope to meet, this book probably wont get the credit it deserves, credit for originality, insight, and literary excellence. Which is a shame, becauseDucks, Newburyportis a domestic national epic to set besideMoby-Dick, a corrosive comic cultural indictment to compare with William Gaddiss National Book Award-winningJ R. Read it and weep from laughter and righteous anger.James Crossley, Madison Books (Seattle, WA)Far more than the typical examination of contemporary domestic life,Ducks, Newburyportis a poetic observation and haunting account of what its like to be a woman in Trumps America and the messiness of everyday existence. A rare mix of witty and visceral, Ellmann is an effortlessly gifted writer that deserves all of our attention.Cristina Rodriguez, Deep Vellum Books (Dallas, TX)A contemporary Molly Bloom soliloquy, a paginated lioness, a corrective, a challenge, aMoby-Dickof the kitchenIn 2019s most ambitious novel Ellmann puts us in the mind of one of literatures most neglected characters; an average woman and mother doing her best in a world that respects neither women nor mothers. Rambunctiously political, tenderly personal, and profoundly humanist, Ellmanns simple respect for her protagonists thoughts, feelings, faults, & successes is revolutionary. And on top of everything else in this towering achievement of a novel, youll find yourself desperately rooting for a mountain lion.Josh Cook, Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)A stunning and brutal portrait of social and psychological dysfunction in Donald Trumps America as told through an exhaustive catalog of an Ohio mothers endless anxieties alternating with the story of a mountain lioness caring for and protecting her new pups in a country hostile to wilderness. At times challenging, and alternately profound and upsetting, Ive never read anything quite like it. [Ducks, Newburyport] is either insane or brilliant or maybe both.Josh Niesse, Underground Books (Chattahoochee Hills, GA)I never read long books but this sucked me in. Reading this book is truly an experience. Its marvelous and strange and stream of consciously spectacular, and when youre reading it, the distance between you and the main characters a busy mom, a busy mom mountain lion- disappears. If forced to compare, Id say its a littleInfinite Jest, a littleMrs. Dalloway, a little something totally different!!!Mary Cotton, Newtonville Books (Newtonville, MA)How fitting that Lucy Ellmanns revelatory and groundbreakingnovel,Ducks, Newburyportis arriving on the centennial of Sherwood Andersons famousWinesburg, OhioEllmanns modernist masterpiece is primed to be as influential for the future of fiction asWinesburgwas in its time.Ducksinnovative style works wholly in its favorthenovelis accessible, heartfelt, and absorbing as it portrays the mind of a middle-aged mother who tries to manage the hectic demands of family and household, all the while constantly assailed by her own memories, guilt, and second-guessing. Ellmanns protagonist worries about it all, from gun violence,Trump, and polluted drinking water, to soft boiling eggs, cleaning behind the refrigerator, and perfecting a lemon drizzle cake recipe. If it sounds quotidian, it is. But it is also brilliant, real and very much alive.Lori Feathers, Interabang Books (Dallas, TX)An unputdownable rant by an anonymous homemaker and pie baker in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. Our narrator streams a running commentary on small-town life, marriage and re-marriage, gun violence, the rise of hate in Trumps America, and her analysis ofLittle House on the Prairie. It all ratchets up to a startling climax that rewards the reader for their persistence.Grace Harper, Macs Backs (Cleveland, OH)An unspooling of the bitter, hilarious, emotionally riveting, mundane, angry, overstuffed, and extraordinary mind of a 21st century Ohioan everywoman. NonovelIve read about contemporary America has managed to do quite what Ellmann has done inDucks, Newburyport, so bursting with exuberance and energy that its pages rustle on their own when you put it down. A masterpiece.Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books (Point Reyes Station, CA)Ducks, Newburyportis, without hyperbole, a landmark work of genius. Indisputably so, and yet that feels like inadequate praise for what Lucy Ellmann is doing here. Ducks resembles a Dewey Decimal card catalog dedicated to post-9/11 Americana being rifled through at warp speed or the collected stories of Diane Williams algorithmically rewritten with a Great Lakes accent. Superlatives fall short, especially when were talking about a book that flouts the fusty conventions of the canon so wildly. Landmark, sure. Genius, of course. More importantly, Ellmann is writing something so free from the standards of those well-trodden terms that they begin to lose all meaning. And thank heavens for that.Justin Walls, Powells Books (Portland, OR)DescribingDucks, Newburyport, is not easy: to describe it as a stream-of-consciousness housewifes manifesto on politics, capitalism, and baking is a good start, but even that description feels like an undersell. Set predominantly in an Ohio housewifes kitchen, the narrator ofDucks, Newburyport, creates a rapid-fire commentary on the issues plaguing America today: the desecration of indigenous lands and culture; the resurgence of fascism in an increasingly violent America; the ethics of butter-buying; and the commodification of happiness, just to name a few. Though the stream-of-consciousness form might seem intimidating, Lucy Ellmanns rhetorical rhythm synchronizes with our own tendencies to overthink, overanalyze, and under-verbalize, and once you start reading, you wont be able to stop.Morgan McComb, Raven Bookstore (Lawrence, KS)I am not up to the task of describing this book in proper or fair terms. A lot of people might go all Faulkner or Melville regarding this majestic beast of 1,040 pages. Lucy Ellmann, however, is not those long dead men. And her fiction is something of its owna brick of a book that is original and out of time and explodes in terms of voice and scope. She deserves to be read. Her words deserve an audience. This book is one of those rare things you will never forget.Hans Weyandt, Milkweed Booksellers (Minneapolis, MN)As ambitious a book as has been published in the 21st century,Ducks, Newburyportis the novel we need right now in our times, a bitter, all-too-relevant descent in the madness at the core of the modern American psyche.Will Evans, Deep Vellum Books (Dallas, TX)At first glance, Ellmanns paragraph-indentation-free-harangue-of-a text seems daunting, but then the reader becomes completely sucked in ReadingDucks, Newburyportfeels like pulling apart an intricately embroidered quilt. Its at once an act of destruction but it feels so satisfying as you see the material of what was become something new. At the beginning of the book I felt excited to begin the epic stretching out ahead of me. By the end of the book, I was left with thread: a basic knowledge of my own humanity that I could only get too through a process of this diligent unraveling. Its an accomplishment. Its devastating and necessary.Ida Cuttler, Women and Children First (Chicago, IL)