Jenny Offill’s debut novel, Last Things, was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel’s layered evocation of childhood prompted writer Rick Moody to observe, “Jenny Offill’s complicated and arresting farewell to this dangerous time is compelling as few recent novels on the subject have been.” Last Things was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Dept. of Speculation followed in 2014.
Offill’s second novel was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and BuzzFeed, and short-listed for The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the DUBLIN Literary Award, and the Folio Prize. Her third novel, Weather, was published by Knopf in 2020. Reviewing Weather for The New York Times, Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, noted how “Offill’s whittled narrative bursts are apt vessels for the daily experience of scale-shifting they document – the vertigo of moving between the claustrophobia of domestic discontent and the impossibly vast horizon of global catastrophe.”
Offill has co-edited the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Friend Who Got Away, and has also written the children’s books Sparky!, While You Were Napping, 11 Experiments That Failed, and 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore. Since 2020, Offill has been Visiting Writer in Residence at Bard