The Babysitter at Rest

by Jen George

Overview

“I'm so happy this collection exists. I feel drunk with love for these stories. They're so funny and weird and true.” —Sheila Heti

Five stories―several as long as novellas―introduce the world to Jen George, a writer whose furiously imaginative new voice calls to mind Donald Barthelme and Leonora Carrington no less than Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. In “Guidance/The Party,” an ethereal alcoholic “Guide” in robes and flowing hair appears to help a thirty-three-year-old woman prepare a party for her belated adulthood; “Take Care of Me Forever” tragically lambasts the medical profession as a ship of fools afloat in loneliness and narcissism; “Instruction” chronicles a season in an unconventional art school called The Warehouse, where students divide their time between orgies, art critiques, and burying dead racehorses. Combining slapstick, surrealism, erotica, and social criticism, Jen George's sprawling creative energy belies the secret precision and unexpected tenderness of everything she writes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780997366631
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/17/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jen George was born in Thousand Oaks, California. The Babysitter at Rest is her first book.

Editorial Reviews

08/29/2016
In this debut story collection, George puts a roster of listless women through trials both dismally familiar and captivatingly surreal. In the title story, a caretaker for a baby who will never grow old has an affair with his father (though he provides her with little beyond “chaffed nipples” and “blisters”) and takes up painting. “My memory is mostly gone, though not entirely,” she assures the reader, and the same could be said of the narrator of “Take Care of Me Forever,” who is constrained to an “armless body cast” and is sleeping with an “artist/doctor” who boasts that he is “dabbling in shamanism.” And of the art student in “Instruction,” who studies under a “Teacher/older man with large hands” at a Queens race track, where the curriculum includes “digging horse graves.” Set among this index of libidinous, male authority figures, the introspection of “Futures in Child Rearing” is a refreshing change of pace. Here, a woman equipped with an “ovulation machine” contemplates naming a baby “Horace” or “You Have Reached Your Destination.” Rather than being bogged down by compulsive sexuality or fickle, philosophical notions like “god is a clock with memory, logging hours,” “Futures in Child Rearing” resonates in the simple way it presents an outlandish mind, as when the narrator muses, “I do not want any son of mine resembling a horse facially.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Our Favorite Books from 2016,” The Believer

“Best Short Story Collections of 2016,” Electric Literature

“Best Fiction Books, 2016,” Entropy

“Our 20 Favorite Books of 2016,” The A.V. Club

“This brilliantly caustic début collection of stories is an attack on the pieties of contemporary social life and the niceties of traditional fiction.” —The New Yorker

“The Babysitter at Rest is an undeniably great debut collection of stories. George's writing is funny, courageous, smart, surreal, seductive, and terrifyingly vulnerable.” —Electric Literature

“We all know it's commitment to something absurd that makes things funny―but in The Babysitter at Rest Jen George commits to scenarios that are not just absurd but weird in a deeply true, ‘unspeakable-underpinning-of-reality’ sort of way. And thus her commitment is both funny and kind of spiritual at the same time―and by laughing, you're admitting this female inner universe exists. And that kind of changes everything.” ―Miranda July

“George goes there again and again, combining the profane and the pathetic with a rarely seen energy. When's the last time you read an opening line this charged? ‘On a bed in the emergency room, being pumped full of morphine and oxycodone, vomiting, then being pumped full of the same medications, I recall the ways I've always been.’ (That little information about George is available―she was born in California and lives in New York―only heightens the appeal; her work stands alone.)” —The A.V. Club (Grade: A)

“Reading The Babysitter at Rest is an immersion into a hidden world. It's a place which is at first recognizable, before it becomes completely warped. Jen George has a way of bending the narrative which is distinctly her own. Her stories are at once poignant and disciplined in their abstraction, and hilarious in their inappropriate and reckless abandon.” —Matthew Barney

“George writes with an ear for raw thought patterns; her renderings of characters reproduced by their preferences and reduced to sad adulthoods are exquisite.” —The Village Voice

“A brilliant and surprising debut collection of short fiction.” —BOMB

“The Babysitter at Rest is a collection of five short . . . stories? Or incantations. Or guides. I'm not sure how to classify them. But what I do know is that they are funny―funny because they're true! And also funny because it's so sad it's true! And also just funny-funny. They are strange as heck. But underneath all the weird and the funny and the kinda gross stuff, these stories perfectly capture what it's like being a person in the world who is just trying to figure shit out. Sometimes while reading I had to stop and ask myself, ‘How does a person write this?’” —Lenny

“Garish, bizarre, and pointedly funny.” —Vulture

“[D]arkly humorous . . . Jen George skewers the damaging cultural imagery of acceptable female adultness.” —The Rumpus

“A headlong charge through the process of becoming―an artist, an adult, a nobody, something, anything.” —Kirkus Reviews

“[O]ne of the most tender and grittiest collections I have read.” —Entropy

“Reading Jen George's The Babysitter at Rest is like having a heart-to-heart with the most bizarre babysitter you can imagine―a sly representative of a world that seems at first to be like yours but, upon inspection, reveals itself to be tinged with more weirdness, more darkness, and considerably more sex.” —The Arkansas International

“It's an understatement to proclaim that these pieces are unlike anything else in contemporary literature. They're so far outside the spectrum it's as if they're waving from another world.” —Shelf Awareness, starred review

“The hilarious and heartbreaking stories are long, some the length of novellas, and full of sardonic observations on the futility of what is generally considered maturity or success or love. George captures the loneliness that comes from participating in a society that feels rigged against sadness, intimacy, and genuine expression.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

From the Publisher