The Gift

A sometimes funny, sometimes catastrophically sad story of performance art, ukuleles, dance, and our attempts and failures to make contact.

In the midst of Occupy, Barbara Andersen begins spamming people indiscriminately with ukulele covers of sentimental songs. A series of inappropriate intimacies ensues, including an erotically charged correspondence and then collaboration with an extraordinarily gifted and troubled musician living in Germany.

Publication date: May 9, 2017

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 248 pages

ISBN: 9781566894685

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Barbara Browning teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She is the author of the novels The Correspondence Artist (winner of a Lambda Literary Award) and I’m Trying to Reach You (short-listed for the Believer Book Award). She also makes dances, poems, and ukulele cover tunes.

Winner of the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction

Finalist for the 2018 Clark Fiction Prize

A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2017

A Nylon Best Fiction Book of 2017

“A smart, funny, heartbreaking and often sexy delight of a novel that presses hard against the boundaries of where literary and artistic performances begin and end.”

—The New York Times Sunday Book Review

“It’s tempting to compare [Browning] to popular writers of ‘autofiction,’ such as Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner—all of whom she mentions in her work—but Browning exaggerates the genre to particularly postmodern, batty, and charming extremes.” 

—The New Yorker

“Loony and profound, vulnerable and ingenuous, Barbara acts to unify the book’s central concerns, giving its intellectual flights of fancy a palpable human pulse.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Browning is working at the edges of her craft, and it’s utterly thrilling to watch. A delicious love letter to readers and co-conspirators everywhere.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“A meandering, quasi-academic meditation on performance art that is somehow breezy and juicy enough to bring to the beach.”

—The New Yorker Culture Desk

“Browning’s sinuous, seductive exploration of ‘inappropriate intimacies’ is one of the most exhilarating and provocative books I’ve read in ages.”

—Nylon

“A smart and joyful autofictional game of a novel that suggests we shouldn’t underestimate the level of sensuality and vulnerability in even our more transactional or semi-anonymous contacts.”

—The Millions

“In so many ways, Browning’s creation is a beautiful meditation on art, and a balm for readers in these difficult times.”

—Bookforum

“Browning’s prose is open and unpretentious; I read her book deliberately, soaking up the fullness of each sentence.”

—Paris Review Daily

“Through this addictive, brainy and vibrant novel, which straddles nonfiction and fiction, Browning celebrates an unabashed passion for art and togetherness in a world muddled by assumed intimacy and inherent skepticism.” 

—The Star Tribune

“Barbara Browning’s gift is delicacy’s embrace of edge, daring’s embrace of openness, dance’s embrace of song, in open tuning.” 

—Fred Moten

“Browning brilliantly synthesizes her work as a scholar and an artist into a single identity, becoming at once a master monologist, storyteller, and historian of her amorphous tribe.”

—Chris Kraus