The Pisces: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 by Broder, Melissa

Profoundly modern, deeply disturbed and darkly comic, The Pisces is about a heartbroken PhD student who over one summer falls in dangerous, ecstatic love with a merman

'If it doesn't make its way onto your list of books to read this summer, then you're probably doing summer wrong' Erotic Review
'Frank, provocative and brilliant' Independent
'Bizarrely brilliant ... Literary erotica has never been so odd, or so oddly satisfying' The Times
'Beautifully written and darkly comic' Stylist
'Blazes with vibrancy' Financial Times

Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend have a dramatic break up. After she hits rock bottom in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika's home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety - not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection.

Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy's understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, The Pisces is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.

Melissa Broder is the author of the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for poetry, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, Fence, The Missouri Review, and others. She writes the 'So Sad Today' column at Vice, the astrology column for Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter, and the 'Beauty and Death' column on . She lives in Los Angeles.

/ @melissabroder / @sosadtoday