Participation

Participation is full of juicy themes: love, drugs, capitalism, anarchy, therapy, Zoom calls, sexy encounters in bookstores, and climate disaster. Anna’s depiction of how relationships change and go digital in the aftermath of a disaster resonates very deeply in our pandemic era. Anna is unabashedly sex positive, and creatively, joyfully deconstructs traditional gender dynamics throughout the book.Plays with structure and form in unusual ways, especially regarding the voices of the narrators and their relationship to the reader.Readers who cut their teeth on Sally Rooney’s subtle subversion of gender and capitalism can graduate to Anna’s more thorny, arthouse style take on similar issues.For readers of Kate Zambreno, Ling Ma, and Jenny Offil.