Participation

A novel by Anna Moschovakis

November 8, 2022 • 5.5 x 8.25 • 216 pages • 978-1-56689-657-3

When the weather revolts, certainties dissolve and binaries blur as members of two reading groups converge at the intersection of theory and practice to reshape their lives, relationships, and reality itself.

In the latest novel from Anna Moschovakis, two reading groups, unofficially called Love and Anti-Love, falter amidst political friction and signs of environmental collapse. Participation offers a prescient look at communication in a time of rupture: anonymous participants exchange fantasies and ruminations, and relationships develop and unravel. As the groups consider—or neglect—their syllabi, and connections between members deepen, a mentor disappears, a translator questions his role, a colleague known as “the capitalist” becomes a point of fixation, and “the news reports” filter through in fragments. With incisive prose and surprising structural shifts, Participation forms an alluring vision of community, and a love story like no other.

About the Author

Anna Moschovakis is the author of the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love and of three books of poetry, most recently They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This. Her translation of David Diop's At Night All Blood Is Black (Frêre d'âme) was awarded the 2021 International Booker Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, she has lived in New York since 1993 and currently makes her home in the Western Catskills.

Praise for Participation

The Millions, “Most Anticipated”

“A brilliant and prescient story of an intellectual woman’s engagement with two book clubs amid climate catastrophe and political strife. . . . Moschovakis brings her fierce intelligence to bear in the structurally surprising and impeccably executed narrative. This is formal innovation at its finest.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Moschovakis’ take on what it means to form community in opposition to the expectations of hierarchy, anticipated outcome, or even narrative . . . feels timely, perhaps even prescient, in an era when the only thing that seems constant is the incontrovertible need for change. Densely intellectual, the novel forces an alert reader to reconsider what it means to participate in the very act of reading.” —Kirkus

“A stunning, lyrical novel [that] invokes poetic forms and devices to propel the reader through its brief, titled sections that dazzle and spark deep contemplation.” —Gage Saylor, Gasher

“Anna Moschovakis’s narrator has been busy: boning up on the discourse of Love and Anti-Love; performing affective labor in the food service, mediation, and information industries; tugging gently at the nipple rings of a handsome capitalist; eating shrooms; exchanging cagey messages with a comrade whose gender remains tantalizingly suspended. Pronouns slip, and so do you, seduced in your turn by her direct address. Participation is a mysterious and sexy dive into the place where lust, altruism, and friendship converge.” —Barbara Browning

“Participation is radically imagined and radically felt: a self-reflexive, intellectual, formally inventive novel that is also highly engaging and very funny. Anna Moschovakis is a brilliant and singular writer with a terrific feel for this cultural moment.” —Dana Spiotta

“Anna Moschovakis’s new novel Participation is a story of seeking an internal world that is very much grounded in the real world. It’s a story of Love and Anti-love, of coherence and cohesion, of fate and free will, of pain and pleasure, of loss and love. Moschovakis takes us on an exploration of ‘soft psychology’ alongside ‘hard politics,’ ‘soft feeling’ alongside ‘hard ideology,’ and invites us to orient and reorient ourselves toward our ‘comings-apart’ and ‘comings-together.’ I hope you accept her invitation.” —Poupeh Missaghi

Praise for Eleanor, Or:

“Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets itself the task of asking the big questions—What am I? What was I? What will I be?—in a style that evokes Lispector and Camus but with the self-referential and weary globalism of the current milieu. A consummately accomplished novel. A worthy treatise on the now.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Anna Moschovakis has done something remarkable.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Moschovakis’s novel is braided and experimental, yet it looks for illumination in the plainspoken and the authentic.” —Wall Street Journal

“Eleanor is a witty novel, studded with provocative literary and philosophical references.” —BBC

“A novel about noticing and ruminating rather than assessing and concluding. The daily weather, interchanges with passing acquaintances, views out the window, are accorded the same attentive courtesy as love and pain. Life isn’t seen as a grand arc but as one thing after another, second by second. The book offers each moment, each sentence equitably and leaves us to decide what is important and how.” —Star Tribune

“Funny, intelligent, and sensual, although also unsettled, Eleanor is engaging from the onset and a welcoming new female voice.” —Library Journal

“By turns funny, melancholic, and provocative, Anna’s novel undoes and remakes the conventions of realist fiction through repetition and compression of time. . . . It is ‘luminously ordinary’ in its progression, where profound shifts are as small as a postcard written or a hand touched.” —BOMB

“Moschovakis is in search of a way of presenting a woman’s life that is not expressed solely through family and bonds with others—that rebuffs inherited conventions while acknowledging that women are still labouring their way through the mare’s nest chaotically erected by patriarchy.” —Frieze

“Moschovakis has created a novel of great strength and flex. Much as it bends and twists and gyres, it does not break, in fact only accumulates more tensile strength from the motion, just as, one hopes, we all can do.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“Her prose is marvelously rich with meaning, conceptually dense and precise in phrasing.” —Commonplace Review

“[A] carefully controlled, intelligent novel of ideas.” —Literary Hub

“Performance art in print.” —Publishers Weekly

“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

“[A] searching and poignant work that deftly positions itself between the unspeakable specificity of personal experience and the disturbing surplus of fungible narratives in our online world.” —Cleaver

“Moschovakis’ book seem[s] to arrange itself as we move, dreamlike, through it, encountering a singular architecture of novel and novelist that challenges us to read and think towards new possibilities, new heights.” —Arkansas International

“Moschovakis is a poet, and Eleanor is unmistakably a poet’s novel, alert to the textures of experience but relaxed in the pursuit of plot.” —Lambda Literary

“Moschovakis’s characters are celebrations of the information-collecting prowess of women, of the way in which her characters ‘weigh and consider’ . . . an overwhelming amount of data throughout each day.” —Rain Taxi

“Anna Moschovakis takes the reader straight to the terrifying edge: that moment where one ages out of youthfulness and begins to flutter in the debris of middle living, flattened out by technology, wild-goose chasing one’s data. Yet, the deeper we look into Eleanor’s unsettledness, the more we see and the more hope we find in her rhizomic wandering. This is a beautiful slow burn of a novel.” —Renee Gladman

“I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that captures so deftly what it’s like to live at a time of big data and mundane precarity, where connections seem at once incredibly easy to form and incredibly difficult to maintain. With keen insight and probing humor, Anna Moschovakis vitally engages the ecosystem of art, ideas, and narratives that make up the things that we call our lives.” —Alexandra Kleeman

“Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is brilliant, inventive, funny, and full of sharp, keen insights. Anna Moschovakis is one of the most invigorating invigilators of our current moment, in all of its complexity and vexatious paradox. To paraphrase its protagonist, this book is a performance that is quality life—try now!” —James Hannaham