“A coolly provocative portrait of an aging actor in a city beset by seismic activity. . . . The narrator’s preoccupation with poetic language (she’s a staunch critic of “junk metaphors”) lends the novel a deep and lively intelligence. Readers of experimental fiction ought to seek this out.” —Publishers Weekly

 “This story advances the thematic precepts of Moschovakis’ earlier work: rejecting binaries for the more shrouded truths that can be found when language, morality, and even individual selfhood are deconstructed.  Moschovakis continues to provoke her readers to ask: What is a story? Or, even, what is a life?” —Kirkus Reviews

An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a formidable, uncanny, and utterly unique new novel from accomplished novelist and poet, Anna Moschovakis

In An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, an unnamed narrator struggles to regain the ability to walk after a sudden seismic event has rendered unpredictable shifts and undulations in the ground. Convinced of a need to find and kill her younger housemate, Tala, who has disappeared, the narrator struggles physically and psychically to contend with her homicidal task in the wake of failure as a Method actor. The narrator travels back in time and out into a dust-covered, shadowy city, where she is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a paranoid suspicion of internalized, toxic language, and a desperate attempt to find stability and feel something like whole, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, and voice, taking tentative steps toward a new understanding of self and world.

Darkly comic, entirely relatable, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Lynne Tillman, Dionne Brand, Natalia Ginzburg, Renee Gladman, Anna Kavan, Sheila Heti, and Fernanda Melchor, among others.