What makes “The Pisces” an experimental, exciting work is that Ms. Broder manages to knead together the genres of magical realism — Theo, the merman, is always presumed to be real; no apparitions here — and literary erotica, all with a bemused, wry detachment.
Melissa Broder profile by Rachel Syme, The New York Times, April 26, 2018
Melissa Broder, since revealing herself as the VICE columnist (and anonymous Twitter hero) So Sad Today, has become a champion for the way women in particular can survive sadness and dissatisfaction by sheathing it in wit. Her newest book, and debut novel, The Pisces, is no betrayal of that.
Broder’s preoccupations — and sometimes her prose — mirror her essays and poetry and tweets, but she has also allowed her social-media style and substance to blossom. “The Pisces” is part satire, part fairy tale and, sometimes jarringly, part meditation on addiction. Lucy longs for what is unattainable in life and so is drawn to the soothing darkness of death.
From the review of Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, by Cathleen Schine, The New York Times, June 12, 2018
Melissa Broder is the author of four poetry collections, including LAST SEXT (Tin House, 2016), and the essay collection SO SAD TODAY(Grand Central, 2016). Her first novel, THE PISCES, was published by Hogarth/Crown in May 2018.
Broder writes the So Sad Today column for VICE, the horoscopes for Lenny Letter, and the Beauty and Death column at Elle.com.
Poems appear in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, Fence, The Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, et al. You can read the online ones HERE. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry.
Broder received her BA from Tufts University and her MFA from City College of New York. She lives in Los Angeles.
Join Melissa Broder, alongside Chelsea Hodson, Ana Carrete, and Suzy Fincham-Gray at the inaugural LAST EXIT reading: Friday, July 27th at 8 PM at Sash in Hillcrest (3753 Sixth Ave).
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