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More books by Binnie Kirshenbaum
Description
Master of razor-edged literary humor Binnie Kirshenbaum returns with her first novel in a decade, a devastating, laugh-out-loud funny story of a writer’s slide into depression and institutionalization.
It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband an...
Master of razor-edged literary humor Binnie Kirshenbaum returns with her first novel in a decade, a devastating, laugh-out-loud funny story of a writer’s slide into depression and institutionalization.
It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum’s protagonist—an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer—fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Instead, she passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow “lunatics” and writing a novel about how she got to this place. Her story is a hilarious and harrowing deep dive into the disordered mind of a woman who sees the world all too clearly.
Propelled by stand-up comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of—or into—the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief. A bravura literary performance from one of our most witty and indispensable writers.
Media
“A New York Times Editor's Choice. ”
“Binnie Kirshenbaum has hit her considerable stride in Rabbits for Food. This novel is compulsive reading; it's wonderfully paced, explosively funny and witty, and very, very wise about many grave things—but mostly about merely being human.”
—Richard Ford
“Psychiatric dayroom dark and just as funny, Rabbits for Food breaks down the mental breakdown into disquieting bite-sized pieces. It’s fast-paced and turbulent, but beautifully complex, and the details are stunning. So chew slowly—this is one you'll want to savor.”
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout
“Brilliant insight and gleaming prose light up this report from the darkest interior... Kirshenbaum conducts us on the journey with steady authorial nerves, high-wire insouciance, quicksilver wit, and limitless compassion.”
—Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck Is My Duck
“A joy-giving and hilarious letter from the realm of despair. Also, somehow, a gentle love story. Marvelous and beautiful.”
—Rivka Galchen
“Funny, tender and heartbreaking, often in the same line, Rabbits for Food is a remarkable examination of the fault lines that run through us all. Wit and anger jostle for space with constant intelligence and subversiveness.”
—Tash Aw
“Kirshenbaum is a remarkable writer of fiercely observed fiction and a bleak, stark wit; her latest novel is as moving as it is funny, and that—truly—is saying something.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“The female narrator I’ve been waiting for. Wickedly funny as well as seriously depressed, she waits while in the psychiatric hospital for the therapy dog that never shows up. Trying to read her face is 'like trying to figure out what a napkin is thinking.' Her mania flies 'like a bat at night.' A birthday card from her best friend Stella reads: 'You Put the Fun in Dysfunctional.' Binnie Kirshenbaum, the great novelist of female neurosis, has given us, in Rabbits for Food, the only story that really matters—a troubled soul deciding if life is worth living or not.”
—Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary
“Every now and then you're lucky enough to read a book that declares its own authority in a straightforward and unapologetic way. Rabbits for Food is that kind of book—haunted, astringent, and grimly funny, it explores without a grain of sentimentality or exaggeration the sort of crisis that any of us might fall prey to. In her 'unlikeable' protagonist, Binnie Kirshenbaum has created a hero for our time: articulate but misunderstood, loved but lonely, unsuccessful but not a failure, sophisticated to the point of jadedness, and on the verge of a devastating breakdown. Prepare to recognize yourself in both the petty details of her life and the profound distortions of her thinking.”
—Christopher Sorrentino, author of The Fugitives
“Rabbits for Food is startling and fascinating. Binnie Kirshenbaum’s complex and insightful novel looks seriously, and ironically, at the life of a clinically depressed woman, and her commitment in a 'psycho ward.' Kirshenbaum might have written this with a blade, her wit is that sharp and deep. Cutting to the bone, Kirshenbaum allows no sentimentality in this bracing novel. Rabbits for Food is stark in its descriptions, beautifully written, weirdly funny, and engrossing. I was riveted.”
—Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions
“A remarkable achievement that expertly blends pathos and humor ... comparisons to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest are obvious and warranted, but Kirshenbaum’s dazzling novel stands on its own as a crushing work of immense heart.”
–Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review on Rabbits for Food
“A burst of energy...our narrator examines her surroundings—the eccentric patients and doctors, the absurd daily activities, the Kafkesque system—with a blunt and biting wit.”
–BuzzFeed Books on Rabbits for Food
“In her first novel in a decade, Kirshenbaum reclaims her scepter as a shrewdly lacerating comedic writer, joining Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey, Will Self, Ned Vizzini, Siri Hustvedt, and others in writing darkly funny and incisive fiction about life in a psychiatric hospital ward.”
–Booklist on Rabbits for Food
“A visceral narrative about the reality of mental illness and the beige monotony of institutionalization...As humorous as it is austere, Bunny’s story unapologetically demystifies the harsh realities of stigmatization and the taboo subject of mental health.”
-Tianna Moxley, River's End Bookstore (Oswego, NY)
“Kirshenbaum's portrait of intractable depression is acerbic, heartbreaking, and improbably hilarious.”
-People Magazine on Rabbits for Food
“Kirshenbaum doesn’t trivialize mental breakdown. She makes Bunny’s debilitation raw and worrying, and not without its insights.”
–New York Times Book Review on Rabbits for Food
“This book achieves absolute genius...[Bunny] is willing to look clearly at the darkness, even if she doesn’t ever anticipate light, and that bravery, and her raw humor, makes her magnificent.”
–Boston Globe on Rabbits for Food
“An intensive character study of a woman on the verge of a breakdown—written with distinctive relentlessness and the compassion that Kirshenbaum has cultivated for all her characters across six previous novels.”
-Mary Wang, Miscellaneous Files on Rabbits for Food
“It’s been ten years since we’ve been treated to a novel by the hilarious Kirshenbaum, and this new one is worthy of a celebration.”
–Shelf Talk, Seattle Public Library on Rabbits for Food
“Kirshenbaum writes with precision and depth, sharp wit and tender empathy, and out of nowhere in particular and every moment emerges a colorful and tactile field of a story that is yours to experience...Layering emotional, relational, and sensorial explosions with the expended effort that is the daily maintenance of life, Kirshenbaum gives us this excellent novel, one that should not be missed.”
-Rachel, Odyssey Bookshop (South Hadley, MA)
“Witty and caustic, revelatory and tragic...Kirshenbaum writes with candor, insight and empathy about the everyday and what's locked in the mind of someone with a mental illness. Bunny reads like a fictional Carrie Fisher - keenly aware of the darkness that looms large in her mind, with an acid tongue but full of heart and undeniably brilliant.”
-Michelle Malonzo, Changing Hands Bookstore (Tempe, AZ)
“Our anti-heroine's acerbic tongue, as she observes the goings-on in the hospital, and its inhabitants, is worth the price of admission alone.”
–Omnivoracious, The Amazon Book Review on Rabbits for Food
“Astounding...Readers will quickly commit to this extraordinary novel. Laser-sharp prose, compelling observations, and an engaging, sympathetic central figure conspire to make it a page-turner. Rabbits for Food is an impressive achievement. It should be read as soon as possible.”
-Los Angeles Review of Books
“Urban, caustic and intelligent ... Kirshenbaum has created a great character in Bunny – one who will get under readers’ skin.”