"Avigayl Sharp is, quite simply, a mind-bogglingly brilliant writer, profound andhilarious, exciting and thought-provoking, unafraid and original: you've never readanyone like her." -Elizabeth McCracken
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.
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. Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and other publications, and has received support from Yaddo, the Granum Foundation, and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She was the winner of the 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize and a 2023–2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Avigayl received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Offseason is her first novel.
