New Directions / Book cover series Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 (Vol. 3 - Vol. 7 forthcoming)

Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, the eighteenth of November repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd eighteenth of November: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why. How is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share this strange existence with her beloved and now chronically baffled husband? On top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara is painfully aware of, as she puts it, “how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)