Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Valerie is an art worker in a big city, literally the product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, in the ways she can acquire and be acquired. She lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself. Watch Valerie learn to love and accumulate meaning as she relates to the art she compliantly sells and the man with whom she steals things.
Synopsis
A debut novel by a white millennial woman eviscerates the industries which produce her freedoms and responsibilities. She removes herself through processes of acquisition and elimination.
Valerie is an art worker in a big city, literally the product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, in the ways she can acquire and be acquired. She lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself. Watch Valerie learn to love and accumulate meaning as she relates to the art she compliantly sells and the man with whom she steals things.
The consumption and reflectivity of a white American young-womanhood
lived in a phenomenological endzone comes delicately to life out of the sharp particulars thefted and loved in this urbane, semi-psychedelic
bildungsroman.
Synopsis
SELECTED FOR THE FENCE MODERN PRIZE IN PROSE
A debut novel by a white millennial woman eviscerates the industries which produce her freedoms and responsibilities. She removes herself through processes of acquisition and elimination.
Valerie is an art worker in the big city, a product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, in the ways she can acquire and be acquired. She lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself. Watch Valerie learn to love and accumulate meaning as she relates to the art she compliantly sells and the man with whom she steals things.
In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, the consumption and reflectivity of a white American young-womanhood
lived in a phenomenological endzone comes delicately to life out of the sharp particulars thefted and loved in this urbane, semi-psychedelic
bildungsroman.
For readers of ...
*. Chris Kraus
* Ben Lerner
* Lynne Tillman
* Joan Didion
* Ottessa Moshfegh
* Tao Lin
* Wayne Kostenbaum
* Alexandra Kleeman
* Maggie Nelson
*. Kate Zambreno
* Elif Batuman
Synopsis
"Sly, witty, and utterly compelling, Valerie Werder's Thieves illuminates how we create and examine ourselves in thrall to late capitalism--and how we're all thieves of one kind or another. This novel gives immense pleasure."--CLAIRE MESSUD
Thieves is the debut novel of a white middle-class highly educated millennial woman. The main character, Valerie, in this autofiction takes the author's name. This tale of her maturation, her life and adventures in sex and crime, exquisitely eviscerates the industries of desire and consumption which produce, place a value on, and limit her creativity, freedoms and responsibilities.
As the novel begins, Valerie is an art worker in the big city, a product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to cherish objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, and expert weaver of language in "the sales game." She generates scaffolds of empty sales copy and lives in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself, a product of white middle class American girlhood. She becomes increasingly aware of the ways she can acquire and be acquired.
Watch as Valerie falls for the dashing and irresistible master shoplifter, Ted. Follow her as she begins to uncover Ted's shady past and secret lives. Along the way, you will, with Valerie, encounter: bleeding meats suavely tucked into Ted's loose jeans, the strangely seductive language of the highly personalized and persistent emails sent to Valerie from her local bank branch, and Valerie's vivid dreams, such as the one in which the minds of the women of New York City are each uploaded into one of many identical metallic cyborg bodies.
In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, Thieves is a wild, dark, and rollicking ride through a beguiling and dangerous Willy Wonka factory of gender, capitalism, sex, and art.
Selected for The Fence Modern Prize in Prose
For readers of ...* Chris Kraus
* Ben Lerner* Lynne Tillman
* Joan Didion* Ottessa Moshfegh
* Tao Lin* Wayne Kostenbaum
* Natasha Stagg* Cecelia Pav n
Read an interview about the novel with Valerie Werder with Fence Editorial Co-Director Jason Zuzga.
Sample Valerie Werder's art writing:
--Remainders by Valerie Werder
--Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor's De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Valerie Werder
--Aria Dean: There, There; There's No "There" There by Valerie Werder
--Virgil Abloh "Figures of Speech ICA/BOSTON" by Valerie Werder