Offseason

Offseason is narrated by a self-described 'sexually frigid, spiritually sick, and morally warped' PhD dropout who arrives at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town to teach English.

While manically lecturing her students about Charles Dickens's Bleak House, she veers from her syllabus to highlight the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin, the impact of the Holocaust and the Soviet Union on her family, and the crucial distinctions between ephebophilia and pedophilia.

Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma - real or imagined - of everyone around her, her quest to escape the past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it.

Savage, hilarious and profound, it marks the arrival of a truly original literary talent.