Out 8.15.23 from Pantheon Books. Available for pre-order now.
“Thin Skin confirms that Jenn Shapland is one of the most exciting American writers working today. She simultaneously crisscrosses and dissects topics as enormous as personhood, colonization, and climate change with such virtuosic verve and control I’m still marveling over how she does it. Thin Skin expands our sense of what essays can be and do.”
--Jeannie Venasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl “Jenn Shapland's mind is a marvel. In Thin Skin, she puts it to work on our permeability to one another, and the result is a stunning, urgent, and layered consideration of our climate-catastrophe, pandemic-laden day. As each essay considers vulnerability in a different form, Shapland proves herself a brilliant and compassionate guide through loss and the enduring need to find hope. She offers no easy answers, but something far more valuable: deeper, more acute understanding—the best kind of balm.” —Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of Fact of a Body |
“A visceral exploration of the thin membrane between the self, the body, and the systems that control them.”
--Katherine May, author of Wintering
“This book is a miracle! Whether writing about her migraines, ‘karens,’ the environment, Buddhism or deciding not to have children, Shapland takes on each subject with tenderness and depth. Every essay roams in a wild and thrilling way, holding to the author’s own spiritual advice, to yield again and again and to both accept and ‘indulge the universe.’”
--Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary
--Katherine May, author of Wintering
“This book is a miracle! Whether writing about her migraines, ‘karens,’ the environment, Buddhism or deciding not to have children, Shapland takes on each subject with tenderness and depth. Every essay roams in a wild and thrilling way, holding to the author’s own spiritual advice, to yield again and again and to both accept and ‘indulge the universe.’”
--Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary