Something I love about Alexandra Kleeman’s work is how she delivers surreal strangeness with a cool remove that never once feels performative or gimmicky. I know that she’s an enormous Twin Peaks fan and her writing might be the closest thing, for me, to watching a David Lynch joint: dreamy, eerie, and functioning under its own internal logic that might not match our world but certainly doesn’t cheat or operate without logic. She’s also the only writer I’ve ever immediately re-read more than once—both of her novels, I re-started immediately on completing them. Her writing strikes some powerfully resonating chord in me, building to a crescendo that also somehow loops back to stillness without ever ending.
First published by The New Yorker, 2016. Collected in Intimations, Harper, 2016. Read it online here
A Personal Anthology 