Hurricane Envy

Sara Jaffe's stories casually sidestep the conventional to create something revelatory and fresh. The stories in this collection explore the textures and tensions of contemporary life, pressing on our ambivalence, how we belong to but differ from the world around us. In Hurricane Envy, characters struggle to be perceived by others as they perceive themselves--as an authentic artist, a "good white person," a legitimate parent. Jaffe brings her keen eye and her formal ingenuity to subjects that range from queer parenting, to the rise of the algorithm in the music industry, to gentrification and institutional claims on art, to post-punk culture, anti-Zionist Jewish identity, the rhetoric and realities of American safety. Hurricane Envy, the highly anticipated follow-up to Jaffe's beloved novel Dryland, shows a writer in the fullness of her craft and insight. With humor and meticulous care, Jaffe celebrates and unsettles our desires, our self-knowledge--sentence by sentence, these stories find new possibilities within what we already know.