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TOPICS OF CONVERSATION

Miranda Popkey

For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill--a compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction

Miranda Popkey's first novel is about desire, disgust, motherhood, loneliness, art, pain, feminism, anger, envy, guilt--written in language that sizzles with intelligence and eroticism. The novel is composed almost exclusively of conversations between women--the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, infidelity and self-sabotage--and careens through twenty years in the life of an unnamed narrator hungry for experience and bent on upending her life. Edgy, wry, shot through with rage and despair, Topics of Conversation introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist.

Miranda Popkey was born in Santa Cruz, California in 1987. She graduated with a BA in Humanities from Yale in 2009, and with an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018. She has written for, among other outlets, The New Republic, the New Yorker's Page-Turner blog, The Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin, The Awl, GQ.com, and New York Magazine's The Cut.
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Published 2020-01-01 by Knopf

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Good Housekeeping, “20 Best Books of 2020” Good Morning America, “20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 Bustle, “The Best Books of 2020” Emma Straub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2020“ Better Homes & Gardens, “23 Gifts to Treat Yourself this Valentine's Day” ELLE, “14 Best Books of 2020 So Far.”

"It's more Conversations with Friends than Normal People, but Miranda Popkey will definitely be a hit with readers who love Sally Rooney." (The 20 Must-Read Books Of 2020) Read more...

"A book of ideas—about power and gender, about desire, about loneliness and rage—but it is also, at its core, a novel about storytelling, about the quest for a stable narrative that can explain us to others and to ourselves...A rich and rigorous dissection of how we construct who we are."

"sharp debut novel"

"slim but potent first novel"

Miranda Popkey's debut novel is composed entirely of women talking to each other—sort of like if Lisa Taddeo's Three Women were fiction—and will make you feel like you're eavesdropping on someone else's conversation, in the best way possible.

"... the novel is riveting, disturbing and thought-provoking. It's a slender volume with the power of lightning."

"Popkey presents us with a shrewd record of the act of unflinchingly circling these amorphous notions of pain, desire and control, all the while quietly noting their clichéd contrivances in snarky, dark humor. I liked being inside her mind; it felt natural. She doesn't arrive at a totalizing, liberated endpoint. The most we can do is listen to her story."

UK: Serpent's Tail; France: Lattès/Hachette; Spain: Gatopardo Ediciones;

“Penetrating, brutal, a brilliant new voice in contemporary fiction!” —Ben Marcus, author of Notes from the Fog

If you poured over Three Women this summer, here's another sharp, fictional take on desire.

“A pleasingly unsentimental novel about attraction and repulsion and the fluid line between the two. Popkey writes about these emotional eddies with such thrilling detachment you'll wonder why you ever worried about love at all.” —Jenny Offill

"Shrewd and sensual, Popkey's debut carries the scintillating charge of a long-overdue girls' night."

"An intimate evisceration of our narrow imaginings of female sexuality, a brilliantly structured character study, and a book that repeatedly asks how women can fully trust their own desires when they've grown up steeped in the wrong stories. Its narrator is as skeptical of her own self-delusive fictions as she is of the stifling cliches and shallow fantasies about women's interior lives perpetuated by the wider culture." -–Karen Russell, author of SWAMPLANDIA