• Features
  • New Books
  • Biggest New Books
  • Fiction
  • Non-Fiction
  • All Categories
  • First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
  • How It Works
 
 
 
Features
New Books
Biggest New Books
Fiction
Non-Fiction
All Categories


Asymmetry

Lisa Halliday

Buy Now

Buy From a Local Bookstore
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Date
February 6, 2018
Fiction
Literary
Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice.

Embed our reviews widget for this book

What is this?
Rave
Based on 31 reviews

Rave

+

Positive

Mixed

Pan

What The Reviewers Say
Rave Katy Waldman,
The New Yorker
Asymmetry poses questions about the limits of imagination and empathy—can we understand each other across lines of race, gender, nationality, and power? The fluttering way in which Halliday pursues her themes and preoccupations seems too idiosyncratic and beautiful to summarize ... The book richly considers the diffusions of life into art, of my consciousness into yours. It is also a musical document, with characters that play the piano or devote a great deal of energy to considering which CDs they’d want to bring with them to a desert island. Like music, Asymmetry possesses the mysterious quality of a created thing moving through time, expressing its own patterns, its meaning subsumed in the shifting symmetries of its form ... Asymmetry stops short of arguing that novelists can leave themselves entirely behind; no person has the power to turn a mirror into a rabbit hole. The book does, however, evoke how our lives can sometimes blur with the lives of others, how a stranger’s features can occasionally ripple up the glass like an arpeggio.
Read Full Review >>
Rave Alice Gregory,
The New York Times Book Review
Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes Asymmetry for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom ... Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years ... Halliday has written, somehow all at once, a transgressive roman à clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction. Asymmetry is extraordinary, and the timing of its publication seems almost like a feat of civics.
Read Full Review >>
Rave Jo Livingstone,
The New Republic
The novel shifts from one surreal adventure to another … [The] subplot develops the theme of true madness so that it can be understood in the main plot, which is otherwise simply full of stupidity, or folly … The stories of Alice and Amar hang, of course, in asymmetrical tension. One is born lucky, one not so much. Both are American, but one was once Iraqi, and so is subject to a total recategorization by ethnicity. Crucially, Alice’s world is an unreal adventure, while Amar’s is totally concrete. Asymmetry is a debut burnished to a maximum shine by technical prowess, but it offers readers more than just a clever structure: a familiar world gone familiarly mad.
Read Full Review >>
See All Reviews >>

SIMILAR BOOKS
Coming Soon

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

Women Talking
Miriam Toews
Rave

Fiction

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

The Peacock Feast
Lisa Gornick
Positive

Fiction

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

Peach
Emma Glass
Rave

Fiction

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

Good Riddance
Elinor Lipman
Positive

Essays

Rave

Positive

Mixed

Pan

Notes from a Black Woman's Diary: Selected Works…
Kathleen Collins
Rave


What did you think of Asymmetry?
  • About
    • Get the Book Marks Bulletin

  • Categories
    Fiction
    Fantasy
    Graphic Novels
    Historical
    Horror
    Literary
    Mystery, Crime, & Thriller
    Poetry
    Romance
    Speculative
    Story Collections
    Non-Fiction
    Art
    Biography
    Criticism
    Culture
    Essays
    Film & TV
    Graphic Nonfiction
    History
    Investigative Journalism
    Memoir
    Music
    Nature
    Politics
    Religion
    Science
    Social Sciences
    Sports
    Technology
    Travel
  • Lithub Daily

      February 11 – 15, 2019

      • Ottessa Moshfegh profiles Whoopi Goldberg.
      • Toni Morrison on Beloved from The Source of Self-Regard.
      • Kevin Young on the time Virginia Woolf wore blackface.
      • Why have so many “tragic” literary hoaxes been successful?
      • On the (booming) business of romance novels.
      • Meet the literary agent who represents famous writers and also builds them bookshelves.

© LitHub