Jenny Offill
Posted in 2025-2025 Readings and Talks Announcements
January 20, 2026 at 7:00PM ET
Location: Copley Formal Lounge
Join us for an evening with acclaimed American fiction writer Jenny Offill, hosted by Maureen Corrigan. Book signing and reception to follow.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by January 13th to lannan@georgetown.edu. A good faith effort will be made to fulfill requests made after January 13th.
Excerpt from Weather by Jenny Offill
Picnic
In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in. There are stages and she is in the second to last, she thinks. This stage can be described only by a Japanese word. Bucket of black paint, it means.
I spend some time pulling books for the doomed adjunct. He has been working on his dissertation for eleven years. I give him reams of copy paper. Binder clips and pens. He is writing about a philosopher I have never heard of. He is minor, but instrumental, he told me. Minor but instrumental!
But last night, his wife put a piece of paper on the fridge. Is what you’re doing right now making money? it said.
The man in the shabby suit does not want his fines lowered. He is pleased to contribute to our institution. The blond girl whose nails are bitten to the quick stops by after lunch and leaves with a purse full of toilet paper.
I brave a theory about vaccinations and another about late capitalism. “Do you ever wish you were thirty again?” asks the lonely heart engineer. No, never, I say. I tell him that old joke about going backward.
We don’t serve time travelers here.
A time traveler walks into the bar.
On the way home, I pass the lady who sells whirling things. Sometimes when the students are really stoned, they’ll buy them. No takers today, she says. I pick out one for Eli. It’s blue and white, but blurs to blue in the wind. Don’t forget quarters, I remember.
At the bodega, Mohan gives me a roll of them. I admire his new cat, but he tells me it just wandered in. He will keep it though because his wife no longer loves him.
“I wish you were a real shrink,” my husband says. “Then we’d be rich.”
Continue reading from Weather at The Cut.
–