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Library of Brothel

Library of Brothel

by Anakana Schofield

$18.95
$18.95
Available as E-Book Fiction
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The Library of Brothel is a real building, “the last offline building,” in a city whose inhabitants struggle to find work, housing, even a date. People are isolated, anxious, dispirited, and defeated. But the Library of Brothel is open, and inside its wildly themed rooms staffed by devoted individuals—Scrabble Room, Emperor Nero Room, Giraffe Room, and so on—customers find intellectual stimulation, and more crucially, human company, even a reawakening of sexuality, while providing the staff with steady and meaningful work. The Library of Brothel is, in the simplest terms, a place where humanity might once again thrive. But the Library is under threat by incapable leadership and outside development. Will the Library become just another AI startup or will it be a last stand for human beings?

This new novel by Anakana Schofield is her most inventive, funniest, and boldest yet—a political and philosophical work that expands our expectations of the novel form and presents a gloriously absurdist blueprint for resistance to the inhumane march of “progress.”

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9798896231165
Pages: 272
Publication Date:

Praise

It's a proper achievement and it's not like anything else.
—Eimear McBride

I am just in awe of Anakana Schofield. I read her like poetry, letting the accumulation of language and ideas to create something in my brain. I loved Library of Brothel; it is weird and edgy, a wrecking ball that is very Anakana. She is one of the few people doing something different and virtuous.
—Yuri Herrera

Schofield has always pushed form in her novels, but she tips it off the cliff in this one, set in a mysterious building with moving rooms whose worker denizens—led by Noble Leader (“a fatter Fidel Castro without cigars”)—are allowed to engage in intellectual pursuits as long as they conform to a very specific series of house rules (unpublished poetry, gardening tools and mouth organs are all banned).
—The Globe and Mail

Anakana Schofield’s fiction has always demanded attention with its innovative structures and intellectual challenges. Her latest, Library of Brothel, is perhaps the most fabulist of all. In a library besieged by the outside world, the various rooms themselves jostle with each other for what is valued and how they can coexist.
—Quill and Quire

As a reader, I am thrilled by how far and how deep [Schofield] drives her narratives; as a writer, I am deeply jealous of how confident, ornery, and funny [her] books are . . . Library of Brothel is a big swing of a novel.
—Nathan Whitlock, The Walrus

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