The Gift — Barbara Browning

A “winning and expansive novel” that “describes one woman's intimacies with lovers, strangers, culture and ideas, and family and friends” (Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick). In the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a writer and academic from New York named Barbara Andersen begins spamming people indiscriminately with ukulele covers of sentimental songs. A series of inappropriate intimacies ensues, including an erotically charged correspondence and then collaboration with an extraordinarily gifted and troubled musician living in Germany. “All this might seem like so much postmodern hot air, but the narrator has an exceptionally graceful page presence: loony and profound, vulnerable and ingenuous, Barbara acts to unify the book's central concerns, giving its intellectual flights of fancy a palpable human pulse. Maybe nothing in this book is exactly what it seems. But the sadness, at least, is real” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).