Eleanor

Or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love

This “brilliant, inventive, funny” debut novel from an award-winning poet explores the contemporary anxieties of disconnection with “sharp, keen insights” (James Hannaham, PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author).

This is a novel about a novelist named Eleanor, whose laptop, containing an enigmatic document, is stolen from a coffee shop. But it is also a novel about the unnamed novelist writing Eleanor’s story, and whose relationship with a brilliant, melancholic critic is getting decidedly complicated. As Eleanor attempts to track the laptop thief from New York to Addis Ababa to the Rimbaud Museum in Harar, “the author’s and Eleanor’s stories intertwine like strands of a double helix” in this “philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human” adventure (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

In her bracingly intellectual debut novel, the James Laughlin Award–winning poet Anna Moschovakis offers “a brilliant, visceral, sensual examination of the condition of being a woman, and the inherent struggles related to identity and authority that exist for all of us” (Nylon).