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Thieves: A Novel - (Fence Modern Prize in Prose) by Valerie Werder (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- "Sly, witty, and utterly compelling, Valerie Werder's Thieves illuminates how we create and examine our selves in thrall to late capitalism--and how we're all thieves of one kind or another.
- About the Author: Valerie Werder is a fiction writer, recovering art worker, and doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University.
- 256 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
- Series Name: Fence Modern Prize in Prose
Description
About the Book
"A debut novel by a white millennial woman eviscerates the industries which produce her freedoms and responsibilities. She removes herself through processes of acquisition and elimination. Valerie is an art worker in a big city, literally the product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, in the ways she can acquire and be acquired. She lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself. Watch Valerie learn to love and accumulate meaning as she relates to the art she compliantly sells and the man with whom she steals things. The consumption and reflectivity of a white American young-womanhood lived in a phenomenological endzone comes delicately to life out of the sharp particulars thefted and loved in this urbane, semi-psychedelic bildungsroman"--Book Synopsis
"Sly, witty, and utterly compelling, Valerie Werder's Thieves illuminates how we create and examine our selves in thrall to late capitalism--and how we're all thieves of one kind or another. This novel gives immense pleasure..."
--CLAIRE MESSUD
Valerie Werder's debut novel, Thieves, is an autofictional account of the strivings and humiliations of a gallery girl, also named Valerie. The tale of Valerie's maturation, her life and adventures in sex and crime, exquisitely eviscerates the industries of desire and consumption which produce, place a value on, and limit her creativity, freedoms, and responsibilities.
As the novel begins, Valerie is an art worker in New York CIty, a product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to cherish objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-aware creature and expert weaver of language in "the sales game." Valerie generates scaffolds of empty sales copy and lives in a storm of things, many of which are commodities--including herself. All the while, she becomes increasingly aware of the ways she can acquire and be acquired.
Watch as Valerie falls for the dashing and irresistible master shoplifter, Ted. Follow along as she begins to uncover Ted's shady past and secret lives. Along the way, you will, with Valerie, encounter: bleeding meats suavely tucked into Ted's loose jeans, the strangely seductive language of the highly personalized and persistent emails sent to Valerie from her local bank branch, and Valerie's vivid dreams, including one in which the minds of the women of New York City are uploaded into identical metallic cyborg bodies.
In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, Thieves is a wild, dark, and rollicking ride through a beguiling and dangerous Willy Wonka factory of gender, capitalism, sex, and art.
Selected for The Fence Modern Prize in Prose
Review Quotes
"If you need a brain massage or to have your heart restarted, Valerie Werder's prose is the place to go. Like an epic phone conversation with your most resourceful best friend, Thieves is full of detail, empathy, and not a few pieces of precious advice. In this book, I finally found out how I lived." --LUCY IVES"With great wit and charm, Valerie Werder unravels the story of a life in order to expertly wind it back around her finger. Thieves is a gleaming gem of a novel. It joyfully ransacks literary convention--borrowing, repurposing, stealing--but the result is entirely Werder's own." --ELVIA WILK"Werder's decision to write in a self-reflexive mode--a contemporary novel in the lineage of Semiotext(e)'s influential "Native Agents" series, edited by Chris Kraus and featuring authors such as Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, and Kraus herself--speaks to a desire to expose and explore the conditions under which Thieves was produced. Yet Werder is critical of how language is strategically deployed in the name of "authenticity," both within the art world and literature. [Thieves is] a novel about the fungibility of female identity--and a shrewd indictment of how language operates under capitalism."--WENDY VOGEL, e-flux"Thieves is a daring, powerful and exciting book that will challenge a reader's notions of what makes for art, fiction, what makes for a self and the many different types of selves and subjectivities that are presented . . . the reader is put in the position of participating in the commodification of Valerie even as Valerie produces real art . . . [yet] the work undermines that beauty by forcing us to question the function of these words as drivers of commercial activity (after all, even a book needs to be sold.)"--MAGDELENA BALL, Compulsive Reader
About the Author
Valerie Werder is a fiction writer, recovering art worker, and doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University. Her writing has been published in Public Culture, BOMB, and Flash Art, and performed at Participant Inc, New York, and Artspace New Haven. Werder is a 2023-23 PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Mentor. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with a black cat and hundreds of books.