Description

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An NPR “Books We Love” Pick • A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year • A Paris Review Staff Favorite • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book • A Seattle Public Library Staff Favorite of the Year • A Nashville Public Library Top Ten Book of the Year



“A supremely literate achievement.” —Heller McAlpin, Wall Street Journal



A startlingly original, incantatory novel about marriage, mortality, and making art.

In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville’s impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days’ work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers—among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell—whose lives resonate with Melville’s. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.

Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.

About the Author

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Chris Bachelder is the author of four novels, including National Book Award finalist The Throwback Special. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Jennifer Habel is the author of the poetry collections Good Reason and The Book of Jane, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Praise For…

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A probing story about ambition, art and marriage.
— New York Times

Weird and wonderful, [Dayswork] immediately casts a spell.… It’s the kind of book you miss as soon as it’s over.

— Chris Vognar - Boston Globe

The words seem to bob on a sea of blank white pages, the ideas come together elegantly and with a deadpan timing.
— Christine Smallwood - Washington Post

A love letter to literature.
— Alexander Chee

One of my favorite books of the year.
— Nancy Pearl

Masterful.
— Alice Kelly - Los Angeles Review of Books

The perfect book for a subdivided brain?a lovingly curated smorgasbord of Melville arcana lightly masquerading as a pandemic novel.
— Andrew Martin - Paris Review

Bachelder and Habel weave a deft, subtle family drama out of one woman’s obsessive immersion in the wonderful and frightening world of Herman Melville.
— Andrew Schenker - Baffler

Surprising and revelatory and the perfect read for all lovers of literature.
— Hannah Harlow, WBUR

What makes the novel so moving…is how Bachelder and Habel distill history down into a kind of personal microcosm.
— Nicholas Russell - Defector

Bachelder and Habel have created a curious, heady cocktail of a quarantine novel that feels like a buoyant literary memoir, a surprising and exhilarating inquiry into the pleasures and pitfalls of literature, obsession, collaboration, and love, all relayed with piquant wit and thrilling insight.
— Booklist, starred review

A remarkable, unusually rewarding work.
— Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Dayswork is a wonder. I cannot think of another book, another reading experience, entirely like this one. It is suffused with the pleasures of reading, of immersion, of companionship in all its forms.

— Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

How to describe this deeply moving and entirely original book? Dayswork is at once a portrait of a marriage, a meditation on art and ambition, a pandemic novel, a middle-age comedy, a brilliant collage of Herman Melville, and a tour de force of collaborative writing. Above all, it is a love story. Out of the most difficult times and unlikely materials, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have created something that can only be described as extraordinary.

— Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, author of Madeleine is Sleeping

I was equally charmed and fascinated by Dayswork, this slender but capacious book about marriage and solitude, about Melville and Hawthorne, about literature and obsession and whether they might not be the same thing. Wry, intimate, and wholly original, the novel surprised me and edified me with every page I eagerly turned.

— Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins