Lithium

The voice that speaks to us in Lithium is that of a woman in her late twenties, compulsively determined to understand everything that's happening around her: a miscarriage, an absent lover, a bad drug trip, friends who come and go, horoscopes, life-as-a-trap, and hopes of an escape...
Malén Denis's Lithium is a novel about what cannot be fully named or pinned down. “Language in this book,” the author notes, “acts as a pharmakon—both poison and remedy—inviting the reader to navigate its ambivalence. I wrote it by following the golden thread of poetry and the echoes of psychoanalysis, letting the images lead rather than the plot.” Lithium employs an especially potent, poetic language to convey love found and love lost (I'm waiting for news from you). It is a book blazing with bruised perceptions of the precarity of a life lived between jobs and between homes; it's a feverish work swinging from hope to despair, about trying drugs both prescribed and not, about migration, about cat-sitting, and about isolation, about the search for meaning and for happiness when both prove so elusive, and it is about summoning the strength to wrench oneself from indecision to action.

Malén Denis is an Argentine multidisciplinary artist and non-academic philosopher based between New York and Buenos Aires. Her work explores the political role of intimacy and spirituality in neo-capitalism. She studied Philosophy, Photography, and Audiovisual Production, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. She has contributed essays and cultural criticism to various publications, including Nylon, The Washington Post, Architectural Digest, KEXP, NPR, Página 12, and Infobae. Her work has been commissioned by UNAM in Mexico, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, among others. Her debut novel, Litium, was published by Penguin Random House in Spain.