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A Novel
by Anna Moschovakis
A formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new work from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis, whose translation of David Diop's Frêre d'âme (At Night All Blood Is Black, Pushkin and FSG) won the 2021 International Booker Prize.
After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic "healing" ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world.
Darkly comic, deeply resonant, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, and Sheila Heti.
"A coolly provocative portrait of an aging actor in a city beset by seismic activity ... The narrator's preoccupation with poetic language (she's a staunch critic of 'junk metaphors') lends the novel a deep and lively intelligence. Readers of experimental fiction ought to seek this out." —Publishers Weekly
"This story advances the thematic precepts of Moschovakis' earlier work: rejecting binaries for the more shrouded truths that can be found when language, morality, and even individual selfhood are deconstructed. Moschovakis continues to provoke her readers to ask: What is a story? Or, even, what is a life?" —Kirkus Reviews
"[Moschovakis'] strengths include her inventive and stylistic use of language and her playfulness with metaphor, simile, and tropes, all skillfully employed to enhance and enforce the story. Most impressive is her character study of a person caught in the throes of a passion they both do and do not wish to escape." —Booklist
"Like Anna Kavan and Mary Shelley before her, Anna Moschovakis knows that the phone call is always coming from inside the building. An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a haunting in nine acts—a terrifyingly apt commentary on contemporary psychology in which what has been lost is somehow too close to touch." —Lucy Ives, author of Life Is Everywhere
"Moschovakis's hallucinatory writing constellates the mind's obsessive recursions with precision. An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth undoubtedly raises the curtain to reveal her not-so-quietly standing among geniuses like Annie Ernaux, Joy Williams, and Clarice Lispector." —Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts
This information about An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anna Moschovakis is a poet and translator whose most recent novel is Participation (2022, Coffee House Press). Other books include the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, and poetry books They, We Will Get Into Trouble for This and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has also translated Albert Cossery's The Jokers, Annie Ernaux's The Possession, and various others. She is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY.
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