Vertigo

With wry humor and profound sensitivity, Walsh takes what is mundane and transforms it into something otherworldly with sentences that can make your heart stop. A feat of language. -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Joanna Walsh’s haunting and unforgettable stories enact a literal vertigo-the feeling that if I fall I will fall not toward the earth but into space-by probing the spaces between things. Waiting for news in a children’s hospital, pondering her husband’s multiple online flirtations or observing the tourists and locals at a third-world archeological site, her narrator approaches the suppressed state of panic coursing beneath things that are normally tamed by our blunted perceptions of ordinary life. Vertigo is an original and breathtaking book. (Chris Kraus)