Melissa Broder

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About Melissa Broder
Melissa Broder is the author of the novels MILK FED (February 2021) and THE PISCES, the essay collection SO SAD TODAY, and five collections of poems including LAST SEXT and the forthcoming SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems.
She lives in Los Angeles.
www.melissabroder.com
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Titles By Melissa Broder
This darkly hilarious and “delicious new novel that ravishes with sex and food” (The Boston Globe) from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today is a “precise blend of desire, discomfort, spirituality, and existential ache” (BuzzFeed).
Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, through obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.
Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.
“A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture” (Glamour) Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is “riotously funny and perfectly profane” (Refinery 29) from “a wild, wicked mind” (Los Angeles Times).
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
“Bold, virtuosic, addictive, erotic – there is nothing like The Pisces. I have no idea how Broder does it, but I loved every dark and sublime page of it.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika's home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety — not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection.
Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy’s understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.
Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn't abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings, and which quickly gained a dedicated following. In So Sad Today, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter, grappling with sex, death, love low self-esteem, addiction, and the drama of waiting for the universe to text you back.
With insights as sharp as her humor, Broder explores--in prose that is both ballsy and beautiful, aggressively colloquial and achingly poetic--questions most of us are afraid to even acknowledge, let alone answer, in order to discover what it really means to be a person in this modern world.
Named a Best Book of the Month by NYLON, Bustle, Alta, and Pittsburgh City Paper
“Each line is a little heartbeat hurling down the abyss.” —Patricia Lockwood
Featuring a new introduction from the author, Superdoom: Selected Poems brings together the best of Broder’s three cult out-of-print poetry collections—When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone—as well as the best of her fourth collection, Last Sext.
Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, with humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder’s language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness and raw intimacy. At turns essayistic and surreal, bouncing between the grotesque and the transcendent, Superdoom is a must-have for longtime fans and the perfect introduction to one of our most brilliant and original poets.
In her electric fourth collection, Melissa Broder penetrates the itch of existence and explores numberless deaths: the annihilation of self, the bereavement of love, the destruction of fantasy, the transmutation, even, of our ideas of dying.
One of the New Yorker's Books We Loved in 2016
What emerges is an infinite series of false endings—each a trap door containing the possibility for alchemy, rebirth, and renewal. Part elegy, part confessional, part battle cry, Last Sext confronts both eternal longing and the mystery of mortality, with language hot, primal, and dark, as Broder’s fans have come to love.
„Eine opulente, herzzerreißende Geschichte der Selbstfindung durch schonungsloses Streben nach Begehren. Umwerfend.“ Carmen Maria Machado
Statt Thora liest Rachel lieber Kalorientabellen und kann sie runterbeten. Statt in die Synagoge geht sie lieber in den Frozen-Joghurt-Laden. Rachel hadert nicht nur mit sich selbst, sondern auch mit ihrer Mutter. Die Therapeutin empfiehlt ihr ein mütterliches Kommunikations-Detox. Doch auch das Topping auf dem Frozen Joghurt kann das emotionale Loch nicht schließen. Da taucht Miriam auf, eine junge orthodoxe Jüdin, die die besten Eisbecher der Stadt kreieren kann. Rachel ist hingerissen von dieser Frau – ihrem Hunger, ihrem Körper, ihrem Glauben und ihrer Familie und begibt sich auf eine Reise voller Spiegel, Mystizismus, Mütter, Milch und Honig. So pointiert und witzig wurde noch nicht über Essverhalten, so schonungslos über verkorkste Mutter-Tochter-Beziehungen und Selbsthass geschrieben. Dabei verliert Melissa Broder aber auch das große Ganze nicht aus dem Blick: die Oberflächlichkeit unserer Welt, den Glauben an Etwas und die Rolle des weiblichen Körpers. Eine zärtliche und wilde Meditation über Liebe und Sein.
Voici Lucy enrôlée dans un groupe de parole de femmes au bord de la crise de nerfs aussi drolatique que cruel, mais qui est loin de résoudre ses problèmes. Tout change un soir où Lucy rencontre en bord de mer un homme merveilleux – à bien des égards.
Tour à tour hilarant, cru et émouvant, Sous le signe des Poissons fait voler en éclats les injonctions au bonheur et à la résilience. Avec une franchise qui n’aurait pas déplu au Philip Roth de Portnoy et son complexe, Melissa Broder nous offre un roman d’amour inoubliable, celui d’une femme combattant l’appel du vide.
Nach einer Überdosis Schlaftabletten erwacht Lucy benebelt und inmitten eines Berges aus puderzuckerbestäubten Donuts in ihrem Auto, ohne genau zu wissen, wo sie sich befindet. Wo befindet man sich überhaupt im Leben, wenn man mit neununddreißig Jahren schon seit einer Ewigkeit über griechische Dichtung promoviert, partout keine Kinder will, frisch getrennt ist und immer dicker und depressiver wird? Eine Liebe-und-Sex-Therapiegruppe in Venice Beach soll für Lucy Antworten auf diese und andere Fragen liefern, genauso wie ihr neuer Tinder-Account. Doch das unfassbarste High erlebt sie am Strand: Ein wunderschöner Meermann taucht aus dem Ozean auf. Alles zuvor Gewesene wird relativ. Ein ehrlicher, komischer und trauriger Roman, der den ewigen Glauben an die Erlösung durch Liebe und Sexualität radikal hinterfragt.