Jen George was born in Thousand Oaks, California. The Babysitter at Rest is her first book.
“Our Favorite Books from 2016,” The Believer
“Best Short Story Collections of 2016,” Electric Literature
“Best Fiction Books, 2016,” Entropy
“Our 20 Favorite Books of 2016,” The A.V. Club
“This brilliantly caustic début collection of stories is an attack
on the pieties of contemporary social life and the niceties of
traditional fiction.” —The New Yorker
“The Babysitter at Rest is an undeniably great debut collection of
stories. George's writing is funny, courageous, smart, surreal,
seductive, and terrifyingly vulnerable.” —Electric Literature
“We all know it's commitment to something absurd that makes things
funny―but in The Babysitter at Rest Jen George commits to scenarios
that are not just absurd but weird in a deeply true,
‘unspeakable-underpinning-of-reality’ sort of way. And thus her
commitment is both funny and kind of spiritual at the same time―and
by laughing, you're admitting this female inner universe exists.
And that kind of changes everything.” ―Miranda July
“George goes there again and again, combining the profane and the
pathetic with a rarely seen energy. When's the last time you read
an opening line this charged? ‘On a bed in the emergency room,
being pumped full of morphine and oxycodone, vomiting, then being
pumped full of the same medications, I recall the ways I've always
been.’ (That little information about George is available―she was
born in California and lives in New York―only heightens the appeal;
her work stands alone.)” —The A.V. Club (Grade: A)
“Reading The Babysitter at Rest is an immersion into a hidden
world. It's a place which is at first recognizable, before it
becomes completely warped. Jen George has a way of bending the
narrative which is distinctly her own. Her stories are at once
poignant and disciplined in their abstraction, and hilarious in
their inappropriate and reckless abandon.” —Matthew Barney
“George writes with an ear for raw thought patterns; her renderings
of characters reproduced by their preferences and reduced to sad
adulthoods are exquisite.” —The Village Voice
“A brilliant and surprising debut collection of short fiction.”
—BOMB
“The Babysitter at Rest is a collection of five short . . .
stories? Or incantations. Or guides. I'm not sure how to classify
them. But what I do know is that they are funny―funny because
they're true! And also funny because it's so sad it's true! And
also just funny-funny. They are strange as heck. But underneath all
the weird and the funny and the kinda gross stuff, these stories
perfectly capture what it's like being a person in the world who is
just trying to figure shit out. Sometimes while reading I had to
stop and ask myself, ‘How does a person write this?’” —Lenny
“Garish, bizarre, and pointedly funny.” —Vulture
“[D]arkly humorous . . . Jen George skewers the damaging cultural
imagery of acceptable female adultness.” —The Rumpus
“A headlong charge through the process of becoming―an artist, an
adult, a nobody, something, anything.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[O]ne of the most tender and grittiest collections I have read.”
—Entropy
“Reading Jen George's The Babysitter at Rest is like having a
heart-to-heart with the most bizarre babysitter you can imagine―a
sly representative of a world that seems at first to be like yours
but, upon inspection, reveals itself to be tinged with more
weirdness, more darkness, and considerably more sex.” —The Arkansas
International
“It's an understatement to proclaim that these pieces are unlike
anything else in contemporary literature. They're so far outside
the spectrum it's as if they're waving from another world.” —Shelf
Awareness, starred review
“The hilarious and heartbreaking stories are long, some the length
of novellas, and full of sardonic observations on the futility of
what is generally considered maturity or success or love. George
captures the loneliness that comes from participating in a society
that feels rigged against sadness, intimacy, and genuine
expression.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
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