An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth

Praise

Los Angeles Times, A Most Anticipated Book of Fall

“My kind of novel: taut and narratively ambiguous, a book of riddles or a riddle of a book . . . Propulsive and elusive at once.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“A vibrant and uncanny retelling of an earthly disaster of seismic proportions . . . Intense, bizarre, and urgent.” —Sam Franzini, OurCulture

“A terribly intelligent novel . . . An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is about ruptures, about the vacuum formed when roles and routines evaporate; it’s also about the strange seductiveness of metaphors, of characters, of story, how once you agree to their first terms you find yourself trapped in that framework. Unsettling and insightful, the novel is an homage to finding a new sense of balance—or to crawling if the shaking is too intense.” —Jake Casella Brookins, Locus Magazine

“The pleasure of the novel derives from its tension between the narrator’s urge to organize—she makes lists, fills notebooks, takes classes—set against Moschovakis’ determination to question the meaning of that organization, to mess with language and existence, and hold it up to scrutiny . . . This is all a tricky business for a novelist to navigate. But it’s one that Moschovakis—who’s played with Oulipian modes in her poetry and has translated the likes of Annie Ernaux and Robert Bresson—strides confidently into.” —Mark Athitakis, On the Seawall

“A narrative meditation on the obsessions one clings to in the face of chaos . . . Reading Moschovakis’s prose is a singular experience.” —Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness

“[Moschovakis’] strengths include her inventive and stylistic use of language and her playfulness with metaphor, simile, and tropes, all skillfully employed to enhance and enforce the story. Most impressive is her character study of a person caught in the throes of a passion they both do and do not wish to escape.” —Booklist

“A coolly provocative portrait of an aging actor in a city beset by seismic activity . . . The narrator’s preoccupation with poetic language (she’s a staunch critic of ‘junk metaphors’) lends the novel a deep and lively intelligence. Readers of experimental fiction ought to seek this out.” —Publishers Weekly

“This story advances the thematic precepts of Moschovakis’ earlier work: rejecting binaries for the more shrouded truths that can be found when language, morality, and even individual selfhood are deconstructed. Moschovakis continues to provoke her readers to ask: What is a story? Or, even, what is a life?” —Kirkus Reviews

“Like Anna Kavan and Mary Shelley before her, Anna Moschovakis knows that the phone call is always coming from inside the building. An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a haunting in nine acts—a terrifyingly apt commentary on contemporary psychology in which what has been lost is somehow too close to touch.” —Lucy Ives, author of Life Is Everywhere

“Moschovakis’s hallucinatory writing constellates the mind’s obsessive recursions with precision. An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth undoubtedly raises the curtain to reveal her not-so-quietly standing among geniuses like Annie Ernaux, Joy Williams, and Clarice Lispector.” —Claire Donato, author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts