Dayswork [B1228]

2024 PB in excellent condition. A NPR 2023 Books We Love pick. A Washington Post Notable Book of 2023. A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2023. A startlingly original, incantatory novel about marriage, mortality, and making art - from a husband & wife author team. In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days' work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers-among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell-whose lives resonate with Melville's. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.

Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A charming read (especially for Melville nerds)"; "I loved this book. One of the most original books I have read. Alexander Chee calls it 'A love letter to literature.' And I agree. Also, as a side, the first time I have ever been inspired to actually read Moby Dick. I'll come back to this one for sure."; "This book is by and for people obsessed with Moby Dick and it is a delight. It is of the pandemic without being about the pandemic. I had a blast reading it."; "Moderately annoyed that I want to read "Moby Dick" now."