Acts of Service: A Novel
Lillian Fishman
A provocative debut of sex and sexuality—“depicting the liquid frequencies of need and power with a thoughtful, savage eye” (Raven Leilani, author of Luster)—as a twentysomething New Yorker pursues a sexual freedom that follows no other lines than her own desire.
“Radical, daring, and bracing . . .for me,it made the human creature feel like something new.”—Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and Pure Colour
I had been going around for years trying to figure out what sex meant to other people. . . .
Eve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship—one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her.
As each act of their affair unfolds across a cold and glittering New York, Eve is forced to confront the questions that most consume her: What do we bring to sex? What does it reveal of ourselves, and one another? And how do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want?
In the way only great fiction can, Acts of Service takes between its teeth the contradictions written all over our ideas of sex and sexuality. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, Lillian Fishman’s riveting debut is bold, unabashed, and required reading of the most pleasurable sort.
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