Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

‘Bennett’s prose shimmers with a neo-baroque charisma. Her style is various, flexible and distinctive…. It has been heralded (by Anne Enright, among others) as an index of a ‘new modernism’…. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye activates and resists our expectations about testimony, confessionalism, narrative access; our presumption that we know just how the accent is falling in a life or a work, that the obsessions and preoccupations shown us are the only or even the main ones…. [It] is interested in both erotic annihilation and persistence. (It is also at times very funny.) Bennett sustains a subtle dialectic throughout – between the ecstatic “undoing” promised by eros and the ongoing possibilities of provisional reassemblage through writing and conversation…. [A] philosophical rehabilitation of romance.’— Maureen McLane, London Review of Books

‘Shape-shifting and splendid in its disregard for conventional wisdom and contemporary minimalist tastes, it weaves rococo abundance and brazen mundanity into something as porous and unknowable as the narrator’s inner world. Claire-Louise Bennett is a true original, working at the brink of what language can do.’— Annie McDermott, Times Literary Supplement

‘If Bennett might seem at first blush a more quietly innovative writer than the novelists with whom she is inevitably compared, this is not to her detriment, but inseparable from the extraordinary subtlety and emotional detail of the psychological portraits her fiction paints.’— Doug Battersby, Financial Times

’Big Kiss, Bye-Bye delivers an exhilarating approximation of what memory feels like. Certain specifics appear fixed – the colour of a shirt, say, or an ex-lover’s hurtful words – but the rest swirls about, shifting depending on circumstance. Bennett’s writing is unpretentious and unselfconscious, with an often startling immediacy. Her vocabulary is precise – she finds a message ‘discomposing’; her empty flat is ‘languidly transporting’ – and sometimes unexpected. Pages of spare, simple sentences are offset by meandering digressions full of possibilities. Bennett is always conscious that every moment might one day be remembered, reshuffled, retold. Memory never fully settles.’— Zoe Guttenplan, Literary Review

‘Bennett draws on “polyvocal, and apparently experimental” (note the tonal eye roll) techniques not to obfuscate, but to elucidate the real conditions of living, and writing, from the perspective of the underclass. Far from the stylistic abstractions of modernist masculinist totality or the avant-garde elite, this is the prose, we could say, of precarity. Bennett’s heroines might seek shelter in rooms of their own, but the walls always feel treacherously porous.’— Jane Hu, Bookforum

‘Bennett writes like no one else. She is a rare talent.’— Karl Ove Knausgaard

‘Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don’t be fooled by Pond’s small size. It contains multitudes.’— Jenny Offill, author of Weather (praise for Pond)

‘This is an extraordinary collection of short stories – profoundly original though not eccentric, sharp and tender, funny and deeply engaging. A very new sort of writing, Bennett pushes the boundaries of the short story out into new territory: part prose fiction, part stream of consciousness, often truly poetry and always an acute, satisfying, delicate, honest meditation on both the joys and frustrations of a life fully lived in solitude. Take it slowly, because it is worth it, and be impressed and joyful.’— Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence (praise for Pond)

‘I’d heard more good whispers about Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett than almost any other debut this year so, by the time I read it, expectations were high and – as it turned out – not disappointed. These stories are intelligent and funny, innovative and provocative, and it’s impossible to read them without thinking that here is a writer who has only just begun to show what she can do.’— Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (praise for Pond)

‘Bennett’s language is an ornate and long-winded riposte to all those pared-back minimalists, and I love it.’ — Jon McGregor, Guardian (praise for Pond)

Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Claire-Louise’s fiction and essays have appeared in a number of publications including The White Review, Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Literature, New York Times Magazine and New Yorker. Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is her third work of fiction.