Offseason - by Avigayl Sharp (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel following a young woman who takes a job at an all-girls boarding school in a small coastal town to teach English literature-and to try, desperately, to escape the trap that is herself"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"Obscenely good and very funny."
--Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book

"To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere--this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfills that promise, amply, and with art and wit."
--Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow

"How does one describe a book as indescribably brilliant as Offseason? . . . It is profound and uproarious, exciting and thought-provoking, unafraid and original, genuinely dark and yet also genuinely joyful. You've never read anything like it."
--Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book

In Avigayl Sharp's brilliant and bold debut novel, Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town's locals--including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she's taken over--implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.

Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present--but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.

Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, Offseason reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of "speaking your truth," the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love.

Review Quotes

"Hilarious . . . Offseason is a voicey, irreverent romp told from the perspective of an unforgettable narrator. Revel in the wit and savor the heartbreak in the first from Avigayl Sharp."
--Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

"A riot of a novel. Sharp twists and turns scenes with a precise and unforgettable voice. By peeling layers of trauma back, we find out how our narrator rediscovers herself."
--Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

"Sharp's novel has traces of auto fiction and a hint of Rachel Cusk. The prose sparkles, not least in the inventive imagery: the narrator's students' over-made-up faces make them look like "wet babies"; a large man moves lightly, "as if his limbs were filled with compressed air"."
--Suzi Feay, Financial Times

★ "Sharp grabs the contemporary fixation on trauma by the horns and rides it to a triumphant and illuminating first-place finish."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Sharp's distinctive debut . . . casts a spell on the reader, thanks to [her] powers of observation and the narrator's eccentric disposition."
--Publishers Weekly

"Sharp's narrator is exactly the right amount of unhinged: She'll overshare about the worst parts of her life with anyone who will listen, and even people who don't want to, but she always stops just short of fully imploding her life or turning evil . . . It's a whip-smart, sardonic book."
--Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe and The Book of X

"This voicey debut novel from a Paris Review contributor announces its wit on page one. Our bone dry narrator's bound for a teaching gig at an all-girls boarding school. A creepy seatmate is squeezing her foot, but she's the sort to allow it. An observer of catastrophes, come what may. For her humanities-pilled erudition and delusional grasp of task, this narrator's already inviting comps to misguided educators like Miss Jean Brodie or Professor Pnin. And in this century, Sharp has fans like Hillary Kelly and Catherine Lacey."
--Literary Hub

"An obscenely good and very funny debut about the black hole of building your identity around the worst things that have ever happened to you. Unhinged in the best way."
--Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book

"How does one describe a book as indescribably brilliant as Offseason? It is no less than a contour map of one woman on planet Earth, from the innermost workings of her mind and soul to her unruly body to the hilarious and hostile world around her. It is profound and uproarious, exciting and thought-provoking, unafraid and original, genuinely dark and yet also genuinely joyful. You've never read anything like it."
--Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book

"To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere--this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfills that promise, amply, and with art and wit."
--Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow

"I am a wholesale fan of Avigayl Sharp's fiction. Offseason, full of voice, reads like Sharp's been writing novels for years. Fierce, disciplined observations leap through this unforgettable story of departure and return in an America that has become unrecognizable even to the girls Sharp's narrator attempts to teach. Hilariously deadpan, mordantly sardonic, Offseason is a knockout debut."
--Jessica Anthony, author of The Most

"Ottessa Moshfegh meets Yorgos Lanthimos, Offseason simmers with wit and elegance. It's a startling fever dream of a novel. When Avigayl Sharp writes, it is impossible to look away."
--Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb

"What a delight to read this heartbreaking and hilarious Bildungsroman, at turns melancholic and achingly funny, striated with a whipsaw wit for our deeply busted modern world. Offseason reads like Jane Bowles if she had access to unlimited data; fans of Bowles and Jen Beagin should make room on their shelves for a new shrine."
--Amelia Gray, author of Isadora

About the Author

Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2023-2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Offseason is her first novel.