ONE OF THE NEW YORKER’S BEST BOOKS OF 2022
“An extraordinary debut novel, Acts of Service [is] a work of ferocious moral and sensual intelligence and a masterly defense of sex for its own sake.” —Becca Rothfeld writing for The Guardian
“One of the most searching and enthralling novels about human attraction and connection that I’ve read in many years. Part erotic Bildungsroman, part melancholy comedy of manners, it arrives with quiet confidence and a fully formed bank of ideas about intimacy, sexual ethics and contemporary mores that Fishman could go on exploring for years to come.” —Johanna Thomas-Corr writing for The New Statesman
“I was completely absorbed by this radical, daring, and bracing novel about a so-cold and yet so-intimate world where safety and pleasure can only be found in the most unlikely and unpredictable of places. It is a book of exciting, provocative complexity, and, for me, it made the human creature feel like something new.”—Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and Pure Colour
“Acts of Service is a stylish, elegant piece of provocation that is also as sincere and searching as its heroine. Even if it pisses you off, it’s hard not to keep turning the pages. It’s a bold, promising debut.” —Mary Gaitskill, author of This Is Pleasure
“This fascinating novel, which will be read as a defense of libertinism, paradoxically turns out to be a book of exquisite moral refinement and almost intimidating elegance.”—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story and States of Desire
“An uncommonly smart, painful, and elegant novel about the ethics of sex and sexuality. I will be thinking about it for a long time.” —Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers
“One of Fishman’s keenest insights in Acts of Service is how context-dependent our understanding of normative sex is… It wouldn’t be unfair to read Acts of Service as a test case for the idea, advanced by Chu and others, that to corral desire within predetermined ideological parameters is to smother it—and to no real end.” —Jess Bergman writing for The Point
“Acts of Service doesn’t kiss you first; it gets right to it—depicting the liquid frequencies of need and power with a thoughtful, savage eye.”—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“I cannot recall the last time I felt this exhilarated and transformed by a novel. Acts of Service electrified both my mind and body. How can a story feel so smart and carnal at once?”—Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair
“Taut, thorny, and sublimely fraught, Acts of Service stares straight into the white-hot center of desire with a cool, incisive eye. This book is electric.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
“Months after turning the final page, I’m still thinking about this fiercely wily novel.”—Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
“Seamlessly written, sedate and subtle and so pleasurable, and quite enrapturing on a psychological level. . . This book opens space for a new kind of precision and intelligence that gives the amoral opulence of desire its rightful place.” —Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy and We Were Young
“In stunning prose, Lillian Fishman explores sex and the self with delicious seriousness and sensuality. I didn’t want it to end.”—Saskia Vogel, author of Permission
“A kind of supercharged combo of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh, and as smart as Joan Didion, Lillian Fishman is not just a brilliant writer—she’s a brilliant feeler, a great thinker. She has the gift we open books for.”—David Lipsky, author of The Art Fair
“As we begin to explore and reimagine the nature of desire, I can’t think of a more timely book. Acts of Service doesn’t shy away from asking big questions about the nature of attraction. All this, but with a great deal of page-turning pleasure.”—Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends and Super Sad Love Story
“This book asks us to consider what it might mean to truly honor our own desires, however messy they might be. I loved it.” —Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass
“Disturbing, erotic, completely compulsive; quickeningly captivating, provocative in ways that I am still turning over.” —Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days
“Reading Acts of Service I felt the uncanny sensation of being in the presence of its narrator, observing me as I tore through its pages. Fishman’s Eve heir to Eve Babitz, makes us complicit in her interrogation of desire with an erotic, cerebral, subversive and tormenting tale, a reckoning formed in the cracks between certainties, like the cooling magma that rises between tectonic plates; between voyeurism and complicity, intimacy and alienation, the body and the mind.” —Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy and Asylum Road
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