MAY 2018 - AudioFile
When Lucy finds her life spiraling out of control, she grasps at the chance for a change of scene at her sister’s beach house. Melissa Broder narrates her first novel with a staccato rhythm that suits her short sentences and the abruptness of her main character. Her brash tone also highlights Lucy’s somewhat abrasive personality and reckless choices. While Lucy’s decision to embrace a new relationship with a mysterious “mer-man” may bring some listeners a wild sense of freedom, others may find themselves uncomfortable with the lengths Lucy goes to explore this new opportunity. Broder’s blunt, graphic language and explicit erotic scenes may be overwhelming for some, while others may revel in the audiobook’s unique story. J.M. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Cathleen Schine
Melissa Broder writes about the void. She approaches the great existential subjects—emptiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, death and boyfriends—as if they were a collection of bad habits. That's what makes her writing so funny. And so sad…Broder carries us along, even as we shake our heads. The book…has great momentum, like waves hitting the rocks…Broder's preoccupations—and sometimes her prose—mirror her essays and poetry and tweets, but she has also allowed her social-media style and substance to blossom. The Pisces is part satire, part fairy tale and, sometimes jarringly, part meditation on addiction. Lucy longs for what is unattainable in life and so is drawn to the soothing darkness of death. She is an idealist who can't help noticing that nothing is ideal.
Publishers Weekly
03/05/2018
The debut novel by poet and essayist Broder (So Sad Today) is an alternately ribald and poignant fantasy about a relationship between a despondent graduate student and a merman. Lucy, stalled out after years of trying to write a dissertation on Sappho and melting down after her boyfriend breaks up with her, heads out from her desert campus to the beaches of southern California, where she dogsits her sister’s affable hound. Despite joining a sex and love addiction support group, whose members Broder depicts with affectionate sarcasm, Lucy hooks up with one wildly unsuitable man after another. Then, sitting on a rock at the beach and feeling borderline suicidal, she meets a sensitive hunk whose only drawback is that he sports a tail instead of legs. Temporarily, at least, they work out their differences, with Lucy transporting him at night to her beach house in a little red wagon. Broder evokes the details of bad sex in wincingly naturalistic detail, and even if the good sex is a little more soft-focus, it makes for a satisfying fantasy. Broder makes her merman a more complex and believable character than most romantic heroes; her novel is a consistently funny and enjoyable ride. (May)
From the Publisher
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE PISCES:
"Funny and dark, vicious and tender, The Pisces is a sexy and moving portrait of a woman longing for connection and pleasure in our strange and alienating world. I can’t stop thinking about it."—Edan Lepucki, author of Woman No. 17
"The characters in The Pisces are so finely drawn and palpably real. These are some of the most real, relatable merman sex scenes I have ever read in any book."—Megan Amram, TV Writer and author of Science...For Her!
“The Venice Beach of The Pisces is familiar at first, but it quickly transforms into a new place in which fantasy can become reality overnight. I love how Melissa Broder navigates the anticipation of lust, the consequences of love, the lure of self-destruction, and the indecision between what seems right and what seems crazy. This book is for anyone that’s wondered where their longing will take them next.”—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
"I've long been a Melissa Broder fan but I had no idea a fabulist novelist lived in her too. I've never quite read anything like the surreal merman romantic comedy that is The Pisces! Broder has always been a simultaneously out-of-this-world & very-much-in-this-world poet/comic, so it's a wild delight to watch her transition to modern-day mythologist. Sappho and Tinder, mermaid porn and nervous breakdowns, the banal and the bananas gloriously litter this uncanny marvel that is pretty impossible to put down."—Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick: A Memoir and the novels The Last Illusion and Sons & Other Flammable Objects
“Starting with Sappho and ripping through the Los Angeles lovelorn, this exquisite story of romantic obsession deftly blends existential terror with sexy surrealism for a one-sitting absolute thrall. This book has my number so hard, I’m waiting for its midnight texts."—Amelia Gray, author of Isadora
“Melissa Broder has officially written the modern myth: a hilarious, surreal tale of addiction and academia, depression and desire, mania and melancholy. Through the eyes of our merman-obsessed anti-heroine, we become attuned to both the poignancy and pointlessness of the human experience—from illusory ambition to unruly erotic fantasy. (Broder writes sex like no one else I’ve read.) The Pisces will have you LOL-ing while you’re longing while you’re cringing while you’re philosophizing—this is what it feels like to exist, and to attempt love, in the deluded torpor that is our time.”—Molly Prentiss, author of Tuesday Nights in 1980
"By fearless and perverted, full of desolation and of hope, The Pisces is a novel that delves head on into the many dark, absurd facets of human connection and coping in search of meaning and comes back bearing fantastic flashes of a twisted rom-com surreality only Melissa Broder's gemstone-studded brain could conjure up."—Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year
PRAISE FOR SO SAD TODAY:
"These essays are sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous. They reveal so much about what it is to live in this world, right now."—Roxane Gay
“If Melissa Broder weren’t so fucking funny I would have wept through this entire book. Love, sex, addiction, mental illness and childhood trauma all join hands and dance in a circle, to the tune of Melissa’s unmatched wit and dementedly perfect take on this terrifying orb we call home.”—Lena Dunham
"At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays (named for Broder's popular Twitter handle) is as raw as it is funny."―Cosmopolitan
"If her Twitter account is a darkly comic 'creative way to distract myself and cope,' as [Melissa Broder] describes it, then her essays are deeper excavations of that same mind."―Elle
"Her writing is deeply personal, sophisticated in its wit, and at the same time, devastating. SO SAD TODAY is a portrait of modern day existence told with provocative, irreverent honesty."―Nylon
"Instead of supersizing her angsty tweets, Broder presents a dizzying array of intimate dispatches and confessions...She has a near-supernatural ability to not only lay bare her darkest secrets, but to festoon those secrets with jokes, subterfuge, deep shame, bravado, and poetic turns of phrase."―New York Magazine
"It would have been easy for Broder to stay anonymous and simply publish a book of @SoSadToday's most popular tweets, but instead, she chose to challenge herself in what turned out to be a triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose."―VanityFair.com
"Under her beloved Twitter persona So Sad Today, Broder is probably the Internet's most powerful merchant of feelings."―GQ.com
"What a decadent, hilarious, important, devastating book this is. SO SAD TODAY will explode on impact in your mind."―Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins
"With irreverence and wit, Melissa Broder confronts the most hidden and grotesque parts of herself...Reading her, it seems that we're all fucked-up, but it's because of this that we connect with each other, fall in love, find contentment, and maybe even a little happiness."―Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star
"Irreverent, ballsy, impossible to put down. With courage and humor, Broder shows us that the underbelly of self-awareness is the existential sads."―Courtney Maum, author of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You
PRAISE FOR LAST SEXT:
“The poems of Melissa Broder pull off a strange and compelling trick: to exist meatily, viscerally, and even bloodily at the center of a void. Holes thump through the pages, blankness crunches bone, zeros growl with hunger. Each line is a little heartbeat hurling down the abyss.”―Patricia Lockwood, author of Priestdaddy
“Melissa Broder is absolutely one of the most important poets writing today. Her poems eviscerate the reader with their misty and murky charm, with their ability to say what is and not what should be, for their love of life and the sensual, for their knowledge of what it is like to be a person right now. Last Sext is a master work, a text of brilliance written in a dusky field, for all of us. ‘Can you feel it?’ is what it asks us. And we must answer: for chrissakes, of course, yes.”―Dorothea Lasky
“Broder’s poems offer a postmodern twist on the confessional, and they push for action in the face of despair.”―Publishers Weekly
Library Journal
03/15/2018
This anticipated first novel from poet/essayist Broder is hilariously narrated by late-30s Lucy, whose love life takes a turn for the strange. For years, Lucy has been treading water, working on a dissertation about Sappho and dating an emotionally unavailable geologist. After their breakup and a bit of a nervous breakdown, she goes to dog-sit for her sister in a beautiful Los Angeles house and attends group therapy for women who are "love addicts." The women she meets are both funny and heartbreaking; one of them guides Lucy in the online dating world, and she has many adventures with new men. Casual sex doesn't seem to help her love "addiction," however, and she is attracted to an unnamed man she meets on the beach who turns out to be a real-life merman. The relationship she enters into with this creature from another world leads to more self-destructive behavior but also to self-discovery. VERDICT While this novel has a bizarre premise and may be dismissed as light reading, those who take the plunge will be rewarded with a wild ride from a narrator whose sardonic outlook reveals profound truths about the nature of the self. [See Prepub Alert, 11/8/17.]—Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
MAY 2018 - AudioFile
When Lucy finds her life spiraling out of control, she grasps at the chance for a change of scene at her sister’s beach house. Melissa Broder narrates her first novel with a staccato rhythm that suits her short sentences and the abruptness of her main character. Her brash tone also highlights Lucy’s somewhat abrasive personality and reckless choices. While Lucy’s decision to embrace a new relationship with a mysterious “mer-man” may bring some listeners a wild sense of freedom, others may find themselves uncomfortable with the lengths Lucy goes to explore this new opportunity. Broder’s blunt, graphic language and explicit erotic scenes may be overwhelming for some, while others may revel in the audiobook’s unique story. J.M. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-03-05
In Broder's debut novel, a disaffected academic struggling with a breakup finds love in the arms of a merman.In the midst of writing a disingenuous dissertation about Sappho, Lucy surprises herself by breaking things off with her longtime boyfriend, Jamie, and spiraling into a depression. Thankfully, Lucy's sister leaves her Venice Beach house, "a contemporary glass fortress," for the summer and invites Lucy to level out, attend therapy, and dogsit. Predictably, Lucy is bad at each of these tasks. In group therapy, Lucy silently judges her fellow codependents, who "all blurred together into a multi-headed hydra of desperation," while plotting how she can get over Jamie by getting under someone else. And while she cares for her sister's dog, she's not responsible enough to handle his strict dietary and medical needs, either. When Lucy meets Theo, a mysterious swimmer who haunts Venice Beach by night, she thinks her luck in love might have finally turned around. But what—other than a tail—might Theo be hiding? And who is Lucy willing to neglect in order to find out? On the surface, this audacious novel from Broder (So Sad Today, 2016, etc.) is a frank exploration of desire, fantasy, and sex. But it dives deeper, too, seeking out uncomfortable topics and bringing them into the light: codependency, depression, suicidal ideation, and an existential fascination with the void each get their days in the sun. When we obsess about a breakup, or about all the sex that comes before a breakup, what are we actually obsessing over? "I didn't know if the universe actively taught lessons," Lucy thinks during her affair with Theo. "But if it did, the lesson was that I could not handle what I thought I could handle." Broder has created a voice at once intimate and sharp, familiar and ugly. Lucy dares you to recognize your thoughts, fantasies, and obsessions in her own even as she makes questionable choices in life and love. This isn't just a novel about navigating the dangers of codependency, but an attempt to learn how we all might love better in a culture that pushes even its strongest women to the brink of self-destruction.A fascinating tale of obsession and erotic redemption told with black humor and biting insight.
