Abstract - Paperback

Cora Freelene lives with her cat, Chloe, in her dead great-grandmother's house. She's been given a year to prepare the house for sale - to clear out every room and dispose of decades worth of accumulated odds and ends. With only six weeks left, she has made very little progress, instead spending her time inventing a sordid ancestral past, moving things pointlessly from one place to another, engaging in futile office romances, and obsessing over an aloof video store clerk who mostly ignores her.

Cora is twenty-six at the dawn of the millennium, and though she's too unaware to notice, her job writing abstracts of Congressional hearing transcripts offers her glimpses into a very different future than the past she encounters in great-grandmother's house. As the clock ticks on her living arrangements, and as September 11th comes and goes, Cora's self-absorption leads her down a rabbit hole of anxiety -- that great-grandmother's house is eating her alive, that her office mates are oblivious to a reality only she can see, that the video store clerk is purposely taunting her, and worst of all, that something terrible will happen to her beloved Chloe.

From Sarah D'Stair (author of Helen Bonaparte and Central Valley) comes Abstract, a claustrophobic examination of a young psyche lost within an alienated, fractured, and cluttered world. Perhaps one's only defense is to reduce the disorder to its most compact linguistic form. Perhaps, however, the lonely world retaliates by abstracting us back.