Jenny Offill | 2025-2026 Readings and Talks

On Tuesday, January 20th, the Lannan Center hosted a reading and discussion by American fiction writer Jenny Offill, hosted by Lannan Visiting Chair Rabih Alameddine. Jenny Offill is an acclaimed American fiction writer whose debut novel, Last Things (1999), was named a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the LA Times First Book Award. The New York Times named her second novel, Dept. of Speculation, one of the 10 Best Books of 2014. Weather: A Novel was published in 2020 and lauded by the Boston Globe as “tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible.” Her critical work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Slate. She is coeditor, with Elissa Schappell, of the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Friend Who Got Away; author of a number of children’s books; and subject of a February 2020 feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How to Write Fiction when the Planet is Falling Apart.” Honors include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction, and resident fellowships at Macdowell Colony, the Slovenian PEN Centre, and Yaddo.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.