Wall

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A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist Song Dong. What she hasn’t reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complications that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her—a tangle that ensnares her before she arrives.

JEN CRAIG is the author of Since the Accident, Panthers and the Museum of Fire, as well as the libretto A Dictionary of Maladies. She lives in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia.

Reviews

“Every new novel by Jen Craig is cause for celebration. They are a reminder that literature is still being written in the English language. In Wall, her brilliant third novel, Jen Craig deepens her proliferative style of self-examination as her narrator tries to contend with that most heart-wrenching of questions: how to dispose of your parents’ belongings after they die?”

—MAURO JAVIER CÁRDENAS, author of Aphasia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

“In Jen Craig’s astonishing prose, language turns on itself and its users, paradoxically bringing us closer to the very things that resist description. As Wall’s artist narrator sifts and sorts through layers of inherited rubbish, provisional arguments, and unreliable artifice—trying to find the needle in the haystack as well as, at all costs, avoid it—we are so completely drawn into her language and her patterns of thought that we begin to wonder whether the gap between art and life is ever a gap at all.”

—EMILY HALL, author of The Longcut (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022)