The Superrationals

Stephanie LaCava's exploration of the cracks and fault lines in human identity is so sharp it nearly bleeds. The Superrationals is a spell of a book. So cool and knowing on the surface, it delves deep into our own silences, ellipses, and self-illusions, how we do and don't connect the dots on the world around us.

Christopher Bollen, author of The Destroyers

At one point in Stephanie LaCava's novel The Superrationals, someone quotes Hans Bellmer: “What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply be thought up or written up.” Stephanie has written an entire novel exploring Bellmer's idea, and the result is a haunting work of fiction which wrings dreamlike language-images from the world, like the novel Nadja would have written if André Breton had let her, or the film Belle de Jour would have made had she torn the camera away from Buñuel. The Superrationals has stayed with me since I first read it.

Lauren Elkin, Author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

These glimpses of young women just starting out—working vacuous jobs, sleeping with the wrong guys, embracing and then resisting the fake cosmopolitanism of our time—is like a perfectly edited film: dagger-like dialogue, throwaway lines that reveal volumes of heartbreak, hilarious shrieks delivered in the driest of voices. I hated reading this onscreen: there was just too damn much I wanted to underline. It's incredible how much wisdom Stephanie LaCava has packed into story of all the ways people connect, and all the ways they don't.

Benjamin Moser, author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, and Sontag: Her Life and Work