The Uses of Enchantment: A Novel - Hardcover

" In a wonderfully intriguing layer-upon-layering of plot and character, this book asks the unanswerable question-- who are we, "really? "Splendid and smart, it is a compelling roller-coaster of a read. "
-- Elizabeth Strout, author of "Amy and Isabelle "and "Abide with Me
"" Potent and intoxicating: a dangerously seductive book."
-- "Kirkus Reviews "(starred review)
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""The Uses of Enchantment "is an act of story-telling bravado, deadly smart, as shadowed with sex, violence, and deceit as the incident that it portrays. Dark and light, clever and profound, artful and effortless, the novel never stops feeling dangerous, both to the lies we tell ourselves about girls' erotic lives and to the easier truths, as well. Julavits is a wicked prose stylist, and this is her best book yet."
--Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and "The Final Solution
""Julavits's third novel is her best yet--a tightly wound ball of yarn, a yarn of family, of female adolescence, sexuality, and experimentation, and of all that could have been, might have been, and therefore must have been. Her graceful, evocative prose leads the reader down a never-ending path, the closer one gets to the core, the more we know, the less sure we are of and so it goes. Mysterious and dreamy--this book is on the pulse of where we are now, the blur between memory and fantasy, between fact and fiction, between knowing and not knowing what we know."
--A. M. Homes, author of "This Book Will Save Your Life"

"In a wonderfully intriguing layer-upon-layering of plot and character, this book asks the unanswerable question--who are we, "really? "Splendid and smart, it is a compelling roller-coaster of a read. "
--ElizabethStrout, author of "Amy and Isabelle "and "Abide with Me
""Potent and intoxicating: a dangerously seductive book."
--"Kirkus Reviews "(starred review)
"
"

""The Uses of Enchantment "is an act of story-telling bravado, deadly smart, as shadowed with sex, violence, and deceit as the incident that it portrays. Dark and light, clever and profound, artful and effortless, the novel never stops feeling dangerous, both to the lies we tell ourselves about girls' erotic lives and to the easier truths, as well. Julavits is a wicked prose stylist, and this is her best book yet."
--Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and "The Final Solution
""Julavits's third novel is her best yet--a tightly wound ball of yarn, a yarn of family, of female adolescence, sexuality, and experimentation, and of all that could have been, might have been, and therefore must have been. Her graceful, evocative prose leads the reader down a never-ending path, the closer one gets to the core, the more we know, the less sure we are of and so it goes. Mysterious and dreamy--this book is on the pulse of where we are now, the blur between memory and fantasy, between fact and fiction, between knowing and not knowing what we know."
--A. M. Homes, author of "This Book Will Save Your Life"

"In a wonderfully intriguing layer-upon-layering of plot and character, this book asks the unanswerable question--who are we, "really? "Splendid and smart, it is a compelling roller-coaster of a read."
--Elizabeth Strout, author of "Amy and Isabelle "and "Abide with Me
""Potent and intoxicating: a dangerously seductive book."
--"Kirkus Reviews "(starred review)
"
"

A novel of ideas that moves with the speed and inevitability of a freight train. . . . Entertaining, devastating and as slippery as a strand of its anti-heroine s lank hair.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
The quest to excavate the intact truth from layers of mythology, ideology, and memory is what yokes the reader to every word of Heidi Julavits's new novel. . . . A riveting, at times deeply funny, disturbing book. The Boston Globe
Beautifully wrought. . . . Assertively smart, trickily constructed. The New York Times
An ingenious, seriocomic study of the female imagination s power to alter and contort the lives it touches. The Miami Herald"

"A novel of ideas that moves with the speed and inevitability of a freight train. . . . Entertaining, devastating and as slippery as a strand of its anti-heroine's lank hair."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

HEIDI JULAVITS is the author of two previous novels, The Mineral Palace and The Effect of Living Backwards, as well as a collaborative book, Hotel Andromeda, with the artist Jenny Gage. She is a founding editor of Believer, and her writings have appeared in Esquire, Time, The New York Times, McSweeney’s among other places. She lives in Manhattan and Maine.