Professor Binnie Kirshenbaum (CC ’80) will be releasing her eighth novel, Counting Backwards, with Penguin Random House on March 25, 2025. The book follows a middle-aged couple confronted by illness—the husband’s descent into early-onset Lewy body dementia—and their final years together full of despair, humor, rage, and the moments of beauty that surround them all.
Leo, a scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, have a happy and loving marriage. When Leo thinks he sees entire scenes outside his window—a man on stilts, swans paddling down the street—he and Addie can joke about it. Rather than hallucinations, they chalk it up to visual impairment. But as those episodes metastasize, mimicking brain disorders like aphasia and Capgras Syndrome, Addie can hardly take it. Forced by an uncharacteristic act of violence by Leo to live separately, Addie grows more isolated, grappling with her own agony and guilt as she can only watch Leo die, both too soon and not soon enough.
Kirshenbaum, currently teaching a seminar titled “The Word, The Sentence, and the Paragraph,” focuses on “memorable sentences that are, unto themselves, works of art,” she notes in the syllabus. “Good sentences sharpen detail and imagery, reveal character, enhance the narrative voice, and pop off the page.” Kirshenbaum teaches a painstaking, granular process for revising and re-revising sentences because she herself adheres to that process—even, she admits, after her books come back from the printer. In the case of Counting Backwards, Kirshenbaum says, “I might have seen fifty sentences that I wanted to re-write.”
The New York Times describes her writing as being like “Champagne—the driest, with giddy pinpoint bubbles—to accompany death row’s last meal.” Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham added that “Binnie Kirshenbaum is a rare and remarkable writer. I’ve been waiting anxiously for her new book since the day I finished the last one.”
Kirshenbaum’s previous novels include Rabbits for Food, the scenic route, and an almost perfect moment. She is the author of one short story collection, history on a personal note, and her essays have appeared in the LA Times and New York Times Magazine.
