Author Guide · Literary Fiction
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Jenny Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation, runs to 179 pages, built from short blocks of text separated by white space. It came out in January 2014, fifteen years after her first, and by December The New York Times Book Review had named it one of the ten best books of the year. Her third, Weather (2020), took the same form to climate anxiety and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In between she wrote picture books about a sloth, a forbidden list and a series of failed experiments, and co-edited two anthologies of personal essays. This guide covers her nine key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 key books · 1999–2020 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Jenny Offill has published three novels — Last Things (1999), Dept. of Speculation (2014) and Weather (2020) — along with four picture books and two co-edited anthologies. Start with Dept. of Speculation, the short fragmentary novel about a marriage that made her name; the list below shows where each of the others fits.
Where to Start with Jenny Offill
If you want her defining book
→ Dept. of Speculation (2014) — a marriage told in fragments.
If you want a novel about climate anxiety
→ Weather (2020) — the same form, turned outward.
If you want her first novel
→ Last Things (1999) — a childhood seen through a girl’s eyes.
If you want something to read with a child
→ 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore (2007).
9 Jenny Offill Books, in Order
Last Things
Her first novel is narrated by Grace Davitt, a homeschooled girl on the edge of adolescence, whose father, nicknamed “Mr. Science”, lives by data and categories, and whose mother, an ornithologist who speaks five languages, takes her on a road trip and fills her head with ever stranger stories, including the Loch Ness monster. Offill wrote it as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. It was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first book award.
The Friend Who Got Away
Co-edited with Elissa Schappell, this is a collection of twenty essays by women about friendships that ended, through betrayal, money, romance, changed priorities or slow drift. Contributors include Diana Abu-Jaber, who writes about a childhood friendship in Jordan. Offill wrote the foreword and contributed an essay.
17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore
Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, the book is a list kept by a girl whose ideas keep getting banned: stapling her brother’s hair to his pillow, freezing a dead fly in the ice-cube tray. It was her first book for children, published by Schwartz & Wade.
Money Changes Everything
The second anthology with Elissa Schappell gathers twenty-two essays about money, from Daniel Handler, Walter Kirn, Susan Choi, Jill McCorkle and others. Subjects include an heiress dating, a man’s forty-year vow of poverty, a September 11 widow on victim compensation, and a married couple writing paired essays on their arguments about money.
11 Experiments That Failed
A second book with Nancy Carpenter. A child runs a series of home experiments, such as testing whether a slice of bologna will fly like a frisbee, and then has to deal with what happens when each one goes wrong.
Dept. of Speculation
A marriage told in short fragments, with no names: the narrator is “the wife”, and “Dept. of Speculation” is the couple’s early code name for the uncertainties ahead of them. After a child and years of strain the marriage reaches a breaking point, and she goes back over how they got there. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of 2014; it was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Sparky!
Illustrated by Chris Appelhans. A girl is allowed a pet only if it needs no walking, bathing or feeding, so she gets a sloth and names him Sparky. He mostly sleeps, her attempts to train him fail, and the two end up with a quiet friendship anyway.
While You Were Napping
Illustrated by the New Yorker cover artist Barry Blitt. A small boy is sent for a nap, and his older sibling tells him everything he missed outside the window: a skywriter, robots, pirates, firefighters and a dinosaur dig.
Weather
Lizzie Benson, a college librarian, looks after her son Eli, her husband Ben and her brother Henry, a recovering addict, while answering listener mail for Hell and High Water, a climate podcast run by her former teacher Sylvia. Set either side of the 2016 American election, it moves between daily family life and fears of collapse. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and appeared on thirteen best-of-2020 lists counted by Literary Hub.
In What Order to Read Jenny Offill
None of her books continue from one another, so you can read in any order. The two later novels belong together: they share the same form of short paragraphs and white space, and readers who like one usually go straight to the other. Last Things is a more conventional first novel, written in continuous prose.
The picture books and the anthologies are a separate strand. The picture books share the deadpan list-making of the novels in a form for small children; the anthologies are other writers’ essays, with Offill as editor.
A reading path
1. Dept. of Speculation (2014)
2. Weather (2020)
3. Last Things (1999)
4. Sparky! (2014)
The years · 1968–2020
Quick facts about Jenny Offill
- Known for
- Short, fragmentary novels about marriage, parenthood and climate dread, built from brief paragraphs separated by white space.
- 1968
- Born in Massachusetts
- 1999
- First novel, Last Things
- 2020
- Weather shortlisted for the Women’s Prize
- Born
- 14 November 1968, Massachusetts; the only child of two private-school English teachers
- Education
- BA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Stegner Fellow in Fiction, Stanford
- Teaching
- MFA programmes at Brooklyn College, Columbia, Syracuse and Queens University of Charlotte; writer-in-residence at Bard College
- Lives
- The Hudson Valley, New York
- Honours
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2016)
- Shortlists
- Folio Prize and PEN/Faulkner (Dept. of Speculation); Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 (Weather)
The red mark is 2014: Dept. of Speculation, the novel that made her name.
How Jenny Offill Writes: Fragments and White Space
Offill builds her adult novels from short paragraphs, sometimes a single line, separated by white space: a stray fact, a joke, a remembered conversation, a quotation. She has said she has always liked “compressed and fragmentary forms”, and reviewers have compared both Dept. of Speculation and Weather to Renata Adler’s Speedboat (1976).
The method is slow and subtractive. She writes the pieces first without knowing how they will fit, then cuts: Weather was written in fragments over about seven years, printed out and pared down, and Dept. of Speculation came, in her words, “from the ashes of another book”. The result is short — under 230 pages each — with plot kept deliberately thin.
Her subjects are domestic and her scale is not: a marriage, a family set against the climate crisis. The humour is dry and the narrator usually anxious. For other writers who make novels out of interior voice and compression, see the guide to Rachel Cusk and Authors like Rachel Cusk.
Frequently asked questions about Jenny Offill’s books
How many books has Jenny Offill written?
Nine: three novels (Last Things, Dept. of Speculation and Weather), four picture books for children, and two anthologies of personal essays co-edited with Elissa Schappell.
What are Jenny Offill’s books in order?
Last Things (1999), The Friend Who Got Away (2005, co-edited), 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore (2007), Money Changes Everything (2007, co-edited), 11 Experiments That Failed (2011), Dept. of Speculation (2014), Sparky! (2014), While You Were Napping (2014) and Weather (2020).
Where should I start with Jenny Offill?
Dept. of Speculation (2014). It is short, it shows her fragmentary method at its clearest, and it is the book that made her name. Read Weather next.
What is Jenny Offill’s most famous book?
Dept. of Speculation, which The New York Times Book Review named one of the ten best books of 2014 and which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Weather (2020) is close behind.
Is Dept. of Speculation autobiographical?
Not strictly. Offill has said it draws on her own life but is not purely autobiographical, and that the book grew out of an earlier, abandoned project.
What is Weather about?
Lizzie Benson, a college librarian, cares for her son, her husband and her addicted brother while answering emails for a climate podcast, in the period around the 2016 American election. It is usually read as a climate novel; the Los Angeles Review of Books classed it as “cli-fi”.
Has Jenny Offill won the Women’s Prize?
No. Weather was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.
Does Jenny Offill write children’s books?
Yes, four picture books: 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore (2007) and 11 Experiments That Failed (2011), both illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, Sparky! (2014), illustrated by Chris Appelhans, and While You Were Napping (2014), illustrated by Barry Blitt.
Is Jenny Offill still alive?
Yes. She was born on 14 November 1968 in Massachusetts, lives in the Hudson Valley and is writer-in-residence at Bard College.
Why are her novels written in fragments?
She has said she has always liked compressed and fragmentary forms, and that she writes the short pieces first without knowing how they will fit together, then cuts heavily. Weather was assembled that way over about seven years.
Footnotes
- Jenny Offill — Wikipedia
- Weather (novel) — Wikipedia
- Dept. of Speculation — Wikipedia
- Dept. of Speculation — Penguin Random House
- Interview with Jenny Offill — The White Review, 2020
- Last Things — Publishers Weekly, 1999
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I never start big.”
— Jenny Offill, interview with Hannah Rosefield, The White Review (2020)
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