The Gift

by Barbara Browning

Praise for Barbara "A provocative novel . . . that blurs the boundaries between life and performance, dance, art, and viral video." " The Gift is a smart, funny, heartbreaking and often sexy delight of a novel that presses hard against the boundaries of where literary and artistic performances begin and end." ― New York Times Sunday Book Review Slate "Deftly blending highbrow intellectual concerns with the informality of Facebook-era communiqués, Browning's newest is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking."― Publishers Weekly , starred review In the midst of Occupy, Barbara Andersen begins spamming people indiscriminately with ukulele covers of sentimental songs. A series of inappropriate intimacies ensues, including an erotically charged correspondence and then collaboration with an extraordinarily gifted and troubled musician living in Germany. Barbara Browning teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She is the author of the novels The Correspondence Artist (winner of a Lambda Literary Award) and I'm Trying to Reach You (short-listed for The Believer Book Award). She also makes dances, poems, and ukulele cover tunes.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Novels, Art, American, Contemporary

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 2017

About the author

Barbara Browning's debut novel, The Correspondence Artist, was published in February, 2011. She has a PhD from Yale in Comparative Literature. She teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She's also a poet and a dancer. She lives with her son in Greenwich Village.

Reviews

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved it. smart, vulnerable. riding a razor's edge between perfect exhibition/revelation and self-absorbed or too insular (as autofiction might tend to do), and also between friendly accessible and not afflicting-the-comforts of the reader enough. yet it's all done offhandedly, in a way where the risk seems almost casual and the dazzling results seems natural.

and, also, you're welcome : made a playlist of most of the songs mentioned.
(not entirely comprehensive as i did it a bit haphazardly while i was reading.)

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know this was a good / unique one because I'm struggling to find ways to describe it. I guess it's a theory-laden confessional semi-fictionalized memoir, along the lines of Chris Kraus's excellent I Love Dick. Barbara (a fictional version of the author) struggles with questions of what it means to give a gift. What it means to accept a gift. What it means to create intimacies across distances and the internet, often with strangers. What it means to be lying vs. fictionalizing. What are the ethical issues behind fictionalizing someone's existence into a novel? How can performance be used as protest? What does it mean to be a communist, to be a feminist? What does it mean to be naked / vulnerable and weak / strong? How does that relate to honesty? “My body is an extension of my body,” How much are we willing to open up to the world and why? Mental illness or disabilities and navigating that with art and with love. Physical illnesses and growing older, taking care of her mother. What even is this book about?

Along the way, there were also long descriptions of performance art pieces by one of her friends -- much of this was not enjoyable. It's like explaining a joke, there's none of the joke in there, just the explanation of it. But I also thought part of that incommunicable part was intentional on her part. That effort. It made me think of this time I wanted to start a podcast where each episode I explained something visual and almost impossible to communicate through that medium (audio words). Like maybe an episode on how to tie a knot. But that would be the point, the mere fact that someone is explaining something in a way unexplainable with words, and that would be the point of every episode.

Then there were the parts about her mother, her friends, the occupy movement, making covers on her ukelele, doing dances as collaboration-gifts. She throws it all in, and sometimes you think "well this isn't very focused" but it's kind of ok. At least I thought it was, it was all part of a mess of a gift someone put together that's also not perfect, but you can tell they really cared to put that perfume in the package as well because it meant something to the giver. So you accept it.

The main part that gives the book a direction was Sami, an autistic musical genius with severe paranoia and other mental and physical issues. Barbara meets Sami online. He's holed up somewhere in Germany and the two start an online correspondence. I started to see what Barbara saw in him, that he was super talented but also had very real issues, but also he was a sensitive gentle person who wanted very much to have a connection with somebody but is very afraid. There's a part where Barbara tries to meet him and it was very frustrating to read. Barbara is much more patient than I would have been, even though I understood what Sami was going through and I understood how that could be traumatizing. I just don't think I would have been nearly as sympathetic if I had gone halfway across the world to meet someone. But another part of my brain also understands, I understand why she is okay with it, why she doesn't have to meet Sami because his "realness" doesn't depend on that as much as on the interactions and collaborations they have exchanged through their art and conversations. There are a lot of themes that this brings up w/r/t relationships real and imagined, and what it means to truly know someone.

"There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most... The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up." -- May Sarton

[Cari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devoured compulsively in a day.

[Ksenia · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first I thought it's crazy. Then it was ok. Then it was again crazy.
Somewhere on the first pages the author wrote something like: I love doing something but ot doesn't mean that I'm good at it. So writing a book wasn't something that she is good at. But, fortunately, it was only my first impression and this book is an rare occasion when first imoressions are wrong.
Of course, I'm not keen on modern problems raised in the book, such as, for exaple, gender problems. I think they are overpriced . That's why I cannot estimate their importance in the book. But some thoughts, some ideas and especially the plot line with Sami (although he was a natural freak) were good. The desire of the main character - Barbara Anderson - for love is breathtaking. She is not only open-minded to support her frends and lovers but also very forgiving and brave.
Political, gender problems aside she is a really nice person.
Social networks and some digital connections are the symbol of our 21-th century. And the author tells us about the reality of it: firstly, the possibility of unlimited communication and secondly, the threat and danger that are always here. And this topic explains why this book is worth reading.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this book so so much. things i loved:

art as collaboration
gift economy vs creative gifts
disability, pain, language, music
emailing something in the smallest file size bc you don't want to bother them with a large file
strangely intimate internet friendships
erotic of hands - digits/"the digital"
learning abt postmodern dance and the idea that "dance is for everyone"
spam art
"all love is autistic"
very careful yet shifting/complicated delineation between the real, the fictional, & the imaginary
knitting a lime-green cozy for an amputated stump
pussy riot as feminist art
feminist art as a form of worship
dance as worship
performance as devotion
videos that are shared indiscriminately across the internet
videos that no one can see
secrets
false identities
prosthetics
"my body is an extension of my body"
lauren berlant is a character in this book

OK THE END THIS BOOK IS AMAZING

[Jeff Raymond · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book annoyed me.

And not because of the basic topic, which involves a lot of modern relationships that exist primarily through the digital space and sort weird intersection of modern art with a lot of these communications, but just how... odd it was.

The book is listed as fiction, but I'm convinced it's not, and if it is, it's *heavily* informed by real events, and the narrative doesn't really try to give any real sort of descriptive structure to it. It's a book about feelings and relationships without either, and it just creates a mundane and lifeless text on a topic where neither should exist.

I wanted to like this and I just couldn't get into it at all.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a gift! I adored it. Written in an autofictive mode, it focuses on inappropriate intimacies and gift economies; art as a gift; via her relationships with a musical virtuoso with Asperger's and an interdisciplinary artist who is trans; but spills out into all sort of thought-provoking territory. Now eager to read everything Browning has written.

[Ashley Gilland · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot of side information that I was not interested in and struggled to get through, but the main throughline was intimate in a way I haven’t read before and it made me very reflective as well as inspired to give gifts (in spite of everything)

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting style. Terrible disability + drug politics. Inexplicably un-twisty twist.

[Laura Linart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seven months after I moved to New York, the Occupiers took over Zuccotti Park. At the time, I was working two jobs and staging a performance in an abandoned storefront across from a pizza joint in Greenpoint. You could say it was off, off, off Broadway.

But back then, off the beaten path was where everyone wanted to be. And though I still see a lot of experimental theatre and performance art in New York City, in 2011 the genre reached peak popularity. It seemed like everyone was making sweet, inscrutable work that tangled with identities, bodily exhaustion, and the dynamics of power. Oh, and also, everyone was playing the ukulele.

I had never heard of Barbara Browning until I picked up this book, but I did swim in the wake of her influence during those years. This made The Gift a delightful discovery.

In the novel, which has deep roots in reality, Browning's alter-ego "Barbara Anderson" begins gifting her Facebook friends with ukulele covers for their birthdays. She admits that she's only a moderately good musician, but she's inspired by Marcel Maus' essay 'The Gift,' which explores the way the exchange of gifts, particularly objects, builds relationships between humans. Soon, she's sending ukulele covers to scholarly acquaintances, internet strangers, and even her students. She calls it a conceptual art piece.

Through this practice she becomes pen pals with Sami, a talented, and autistic, musician living in Cologne. They begin to exchange gifts with one another—songs, hand dances, daily messages—and through the exchange develop an intimate relationship. Or, as intimate a relationship as one can achieve digitally. Some of Barbara's friends think she's being catfished.

The other relationships central to the novel are Barbara's friendship with the dancer and performance artist, Tye Larkin Hayes, as well as her romantic partnership with a poet named Olivia. I realized that this may be the first novel I've ever read that centered a queer woman in a relationship with a woman. I'm even struggling to come up with any lesbian characters in my reading oeuvre at all, though this is must due to my poor memory and lack of note taking. I must have come upon one at some point—the pair of aunts, the kooky friend. Barbara Anderson may be kooky, but she's not a sidekick and this relationship feels real.

As Barbara continues her conceptual art piece—that is, spamming virtual strangers with ukulele covers—she participates in the Occupy movement, becomes an accidental expert on Pussy Riot, and teaches workshops on "inappropriate intimacy." Barbara Anderson tells us that if you google the author of this novel, you'll find that Barbara Browning has done pretty much everything the "fictional" Barbara Anderson does.

The tension between what is real and what is fiction, and whether it matters if we use one or the other on our way to a deeper truth, is at the heart of the novel. Browning asks permission to write about her subjects, shows them what she's written, and allows them to make changes as they see fit—to conceal their identities or reveal something more. Essentially, she asks for consent.

This strange brew of reality and fiction is reflected in Barbara's relationship with the elusive Sami—especially after she makes a trip to Cologne to visit him. Barbara must confront the burden of intimacy that gifts convey, and consider what it means to know somebody.

For me, the moment of heartbreak in this book came unexpectedly, when I discovered that a character I loved is not a real person like the other characters. But, Browning gently reminds us, it's alright because the character is real, and therefore the truth of her is real.

As a novel, though, I don't know that The Gift works—at least in the classical sense. At times, the book drags. I struggled to keep up with exactly what was going on with Tye's performance pieces, which Browning describes in detail throughout the novel. Browning's off-handed narration can be irksome. I nodded in agreement when Barbara Anderson admits her mother once called her "saccharine." But if she's over sweet, it's easy to forgive. And kindness can be a radical act—especially in a novel.

Mostly, 'The Gift' reminds me of simpler times. As I reflect on 2011 from the vantage point of 2018, I can't help but wonder if the Occupy movement was our last chance for a peaceful resolution to income inequality. Even after the protesters were removed from Zuccotti Park, their ideas coursed through the work of artists and makers across the country.

But now those ideas have been repurposed as advertising copy for wellness products, expensive music festivals and Burning Man, which touts itself as a "radically inclusive gift economy." Inclusive, but only if you can afford it, that is.

Today the 1% is a foregone confusion and late-stage capitalism is catapulting the .01% into astronomical wealth. The mass of Americans still struggle to support themselves and their families, even those with good jobs. Add our President to the mix, and, well, gifting ukulele covers suddenly seems a bit quixotic.

But perhaps the only way to overcome this surreal period in modern history is to tilt at windmills. As an experiment, I challenged myself to view my own creative work as a gift rather than an end product. Almost immediately, I felt some relief from my endlessly overbearing ego. And, as a result, I am more playful, open and free—I might even pick up the ukulele.

[Jaime Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

felt very attached to this on a personal level because of all the downtown nyc name dropping and the performance in jokes. but also very touching. on many levels. though there is something i can’t quite name that irked me about it. which resembles the way chris kraus has also started to irk me. though when I was 26, that kind of writing filled my heart with joy. maybe i’ll come around again?

[Ciarra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like experimental writing, but this dragged too much. Quit at page 18.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

didn't want to write about this yet because i didn't want to be done with it! wanted to hold on to it a bit longer. and felt i had read it a bit too quickly, overly quickly (a sensation that somehow felt most similar to say spilling a glass of milk, or accidentally shaking a carton of milk with the top off, which yes i Did do last friday, with, yes, a carton of not just milk but oat milk...), that i almost had to reread it.
a couple reasons for this reaction, i think. last week, or maybe the week before, i confessed to a new friend—a friend who is far too good at getting me to trip over the threshold into these kinds of confessions—my stupid habit of using goodreads as a sort of public diary that i try to forget is actually public while also being too attention-seeking to actually make my account private. i didn't articulate the habit that well, probably because several years into this gambit i have still not fully thought through why i do this. (i think at least one part of the answer is i do sort of enjoy the thought of people entirely unknown to me stumbling into my notes here, rendering me for all intents and purposes anonymous even if my name is known—maybe a way of giving back that is somewhat more difficult than the somewhat more welcoming and traditional archives i have so often mined of tumblr, twitter, and so on...) my friend asked if i knew if any of my goodreads friends (whose existence, i explained, i especially tend to ignore—or pretend to ignore—when writing here) actually read, or regularly read, my notes. i said i had no idea, maybe sometimes one, i knew they at least sometimes noticed what i was reading. i meant the one who lent me The Gift! i wanted, naturally, for their gift (lol, whatever, obligatory at some point or another or more) to last me a little while longer. to make as much use as i could, full use, of something that wasn't mine, that was only temporarily mine, that wouldn't stay mine in the same way forever. i wanted my thoughts to be more sharply honed, my notes to be better, worthwhile. instead the longer i've been out of school the more insanely parenthetic and qualified my sentences get, indulging my worst impulses.

(the gift is decidedly more rambling, more studiedly (but not coming off as such, as effortfully!) messy than i'm trying to reach you, so in that way at least these sentences are reflective. although as ever browning is remarkably lucid, guileless, clear. as ever her nakedness belies her artful artlessness. what's the old ovid line (indulge me!), adeo ars arte latet sua? i mean of course not like that, but those words are all in there somewhere, and of course browning is in no way interested, most of the time, in hiding her art.)

of course the gift is a great demonstration of the sometimes happy conclusions of indulgence. indulging, allowing—acts prompted by or acts that initiate intimacy—these are verbs that feel right here, verbs that describe much of what happens and how it happens. i read too quickly but didn't want to be done with the gift because barbara browning is remarkably good at—not welcoming the reader into her world, but rendering the reader more open to the kinds of experiences and interests that form & inform her world. her "mindset" i guess which i realize now is not a word i love. typically i kind of disdain any novel that gets too self-satisfied about its existence in an online "distracted" present but browning writes such novels with simplicity and honesty, because the online places her writing directs you too are just as welcoming and curious as the writing, they branch out from it—her music, her dancing, the way the search for the identities of the lightly anonymized characters in the gift don't lead you to tawdry conclusions but to new knowledge, the art they make, how to maybe see it for yourself in the future—the book's fictions (its ekphrastic fictions especially!) allow you to involve yourself fruitfully in reality. (fictions and not lies, browning would note.) i have been thinking, especially, about the ending of alice gregory's new yorker piece on browning, which reveals the real ending to browning's (rather than andersen's) online correspondence, and which i read long before i ever read the gift itself—so i was surprised the correspondence in the gift ended how it did. in telling gregory the ending, browning knowingly added a new branch to the online exploration and knowledge gathering that reading the gift prompts. i mean, the gift of the novel is that you take the knowledge and the reality with you—it is given to you to do with as you please, like any novel, but here inescapably so. they're not attached to the book.

last, i too must mention my stupid pleasure with the fact of lauren berlant as a character in this novel, as the smartest woman in the united states of america. perfect. she's not wrong.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barbara Browning writes:

Maybe you're thinking I should take everything my friend Lun-Yu tells me with a grain of salt. She also told me that day one of her favorite psychoanalytic theorists was Wilfred Bion. I'd never read Bion before, so after she left I read a bit about him, and I found online the complete text of a seminar he held in Paris in 1978. The beginning of this seminar is very interesting. At least it was to me. Bion says that he wants his listeners to imagine a scenario: they're seeing a new patient, a twenty-five-year-old man who comes in complaining of some dissatisfaction in his family life. Bion says he's not sure what family the man is referring to, and asks his age, which the man gives as forty-five. Bion is confused. He just said the man was twenty-five, and then he notices that the patient has wrinkles, and appears in his sixties. He asks his listeners to consider this confusing state of affairs and to determine whether they would, under the circumstances, take on such a patient.

He says the question is much like the question of what you would do if you walked into a bookstore, picked up a book, and read the scenario he just described. He asks you if you would continue reading this book. Then he says, imagine it's not a book, but a piece of music. Or a building you're in, and you see the way the light falls, you see the colors coming through the window. Do you want to think about the window some more?

I imagine these questions were somewhat perplexing to some of the participants in the seminar. At one point in the transcript, someone in the audience makes an "inaudible reference" to "psychotic experience." Bion calls that a very "cerebral" question, not a practical one to the analyst. He says that analysts shouldn't be blinded by labels like manic-depressive or schizophrenic. Rather, they should be asking themselves what kinds of artists they are and whether there's an interesting spark that occurs with a potential analysand that might lead to something productive in the consulting room or, as he puts it, the "atelier." Somebody asks what an analyst is supposed to do if he's not really the artistic type, and Bion says that if that's the case, then the person's in the wrong line of work. In fact, he says, he doesn't even really know what would be the right line of work, since a person needs to be an artist in everyday life.

The he throws out the term artist, which has obviously become meaningless. The point is, he tells them, that reducing things to "scientific" diagnoses or narrow definitions is really the death of things. "You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable."

Obviously I loved that. I wrote Lun-Yu and told her about the seminar I'd read and how it had moved me. She said, "Oh, that's the 'bad' Bion, from his mystical phase. That's also the part I love best." Apparently sometimes he wasn't quite so wacky.

[Princess · Rating 3 out of 5]

To call this book "unlike any other I've ever read" might seem hyperbolic, but it's true. First, there's the narrator's tone, which comes across as guileless and shrewd, but also a little daft. (At times, she seems to be reporting quite simply what happened when she engaged in intimate correspondences with strangers online, and also what was happening in her own life at the same time. Some of this narrative is analyzed while she writes it, for example, she will write for pages about a piece of performance art that she viewed and it will be smart and engaging. And then moments later, she will turn around and make personal decisions that seem to defy logic, and these, too, she will appear to record faithfully.)

Second, there's the fact that the narrator admits pretty early on that her life is actually that of the author--with some bits fictionalized--and she takes specific care to point out which characters or situations in the narrative are fiction or semi-fiction. This, the narrator/author insists, is what makes her "honest." But how can a reader trust such self-aware artifice? Where is the truth and where is the lie? In "true" fiction, the answer would not matter; the reader could appreciate the book on "its own terms," so to speak. But what is one to do, when a book is fiction, non-fiction, performance, truth?

Worse (or, perhaps, best?), this artifice or performance occurs on two levels: the technique and the plot. At the end of the book, I'm not at all sure what I'm supposed to think. (And maybe this is the point: to force the reader to ruminate on truth, lies, and doubt.) The only thing I'm certain of at the end is that while I have been impressed by the author's intellectual project, I haven't exactly enjoyed engaging with it. I've been by turns incredulous, flummoxed, exasperated, and as I attempt to form words now, quite...disturbed.

About midway through the book, the narrator turns over the word "gift" and what it means to both giver and recipient. She considers that in German the word "gift" means poison. And she uses that realization to grapple with the deceit she has just suffered at the hands of one of her online correspondents, with whom she has exchanged many sentimental musical gifts. I see now that that grand realization was also a mischievous hint to the reader that this book, "The Gift" was going to turn out to be a poisonous gift. Well played, Barbara Browning.

[Julene · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Don't write about your life - it's not interesting, I promise," is an adage that's been rephrased by varying authors a thousand times over. Merging real life with imagined life makes perfect sense to me, but I found myself wishing the author would lean further in one direction or another over the course of reading the book. As the Slate reviewer said, the book blurs boundaries between art forms, between reality and Browning's particular definition of "fiction", storytelling with what might be truth-telling... but might not.

Fiction as memoir as not-quite-whole-truths is a shaky ground, especially when the author is constantly addressing what shaky ground she's on and which characters are composites or entirely made up or "made up" but filling in for a person that didn't want to be included in her book.

Clearly, I have mixed feelings on the subject and its purpose. Maugham would be disappointed, but I don't know if I am or not. Would definitely recommend this to friends but I don't know if I would read it again. Unsure if this is a book that requires familiarity with the author's other work (written and otherwise) to truly appreciate it. Couldn't bring myself to put it down for other items on my reading shelf, but didn't enjoy it; a matter of preference, I guess.

[Beatrice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a hard time getting into this book because I couldn't see it as more than a kind of pedestrian exploration of art making and art. The thing that made it worth finishing was reaching the point in the fictional art making where fictional Barbara realizes that the book she thought she was writing was not to be and that she had no control over the story. There's this beautiful unfolding that happens then that makes this a story not about art on its own but about people and artists. How real are people? Does the medium mediate how real we are? Aren't we all mediating reality even IRL? Interesting questions proposed from this book and I loved considering and answering them. But that doesn't happen until 50-100 pages from the end.

I still probably wouldn't recommend this to anyone. Also, I think the art in this book is really, really bad (maybe it's supposed to be?). Narrator is also more creepy than charming, but maybe you're into that.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gift

My heart broke and mended so many times. I have just finished my first read through, and I'm going to go back and read it again tonight, more slowly. This is a story that begs to be engaged with. That in some ways demands active engagement. I bought this on a whim from bookbub or some other thing and I cant quite say how but I am certain it is going to be one of those catalysts for transformation. I am already minutely adjusting my world view and ways I engage with the world after reading this. There is a lot of simple pleasure in the narrative. There is a lot that is challenging. Highly reccomend

[Kris Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gift

My heart broke and mended so many times. I have just finished my first read through, and I'm going to go back and read it again tonight, more slowly. This is a story that begs to be engaged with. That in some ways demands active engagement. I bought this on a whim from bookbub or some other thing and I cant quite say how but I am certain it is going to be one of those catalysts for transformation. I am already minutely adjusting my world view and ways I engage with the world after reading this. There is a lot of simple pleasure in the narrative. There is a lot that is challenging. Highly reccomend

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Browning explored some interesting concepts here--technology and human connections, the social exchanges of giving and owing things to each other. My central problem is that I didn't find Browning as narrator and as a character in the novel especially compelling: the way she provokes and moves and observes the reactions and actions of her friends/characters. I'm also not sure if or how the book would work as a third-person piece, or as something more detached. The experimentation and the correspondence just felt somewhat tedious by the end.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

In November I was having a discussion about the limitations of print and suggested to my friend Barbara Browning's book "I'm Trying to Reach You," in which the author makes use of YouTube videos within the novel.

That led me to see what else the author is written, and with "The Gift" once again Barbara Browning has utilized multimedia, this time in the form of nine dances which can be accessed via Vimeo.

This is a smart book that is personal and political, intimate and global, touching and funny about communication, relationships, performance art and dance, music and more.

[Sarah High]

read this for a work book club. fun read, very self aware and strange but in the best way. loved the ending.

throughout, it harps on the concept of gift giving amidst capitalism, drawing on the works and art of david graeber, john maus, pussyriot, and others. turns out giving gifts under a capitalist society makes the other feel indebted (i personally feel this all the time). anyways i could say more but overall i’d say 3.5 or 4/5 for earnestness.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

there's dancing about architecture then there's writing about dancing.

Some of this is really brilliant and riveting and then it just keeps going.

Sometimes you can be too smart for your own good, too meta for your meta meta.

I like Ben Lerner's books for the same reasons I wanted to like this one.

So overall it works and it doesn't. Like a gift.

[Maria do Socorro Baptista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tenho somente uma palavra para descrever este livro: surpreendente!! No meu entendimento, trata-se de uma carta dirigida ao leitor, ou à leitora, ou seja, a mim, ou a quem quer que o leia, carta na qual a narradora se desnuda, contando diversos momentos de sua vida, sempre afirmando que se trata de um texto fictício, um romance. Muito, muito interessante.

[Hillary Humphreys · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, wonderful, messy novel. Browning cuts herself open for us and I think that's the real "gift" of this book. It is a bit more high-minded than I usually go for, however, and I think I will need to reread it at some point in the future so as to truly understand it.

[Theodora (paper.bag.reader) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Experimental and tackling some interesting ideas of art, gift making, vulnerability and society. However I failed to really connect and “feel” both the narrative voice and the characters. Regardless, an interesting work that triggered some thinking

[Lucía · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author effectively establishes intimacy (some might even call it inappropriate intimacy) with the reader. The book’s uniqueness is felt instantly, and it either captivates you from the start or it doesn’t. I, personally, could not put it down.

[Dustin Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stop right now...go get this book and read it

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't as into this as I'm trying to reach you, but it was still really thoughtful and empathetic, as I've come to expect!

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barbara Browning's The Gift is the rambling, autofictional, intellectual novel about dancing, connecting, sex, gender, and disability of the year. A pleasure to behold on every single page.