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The Reservoir (Paperback Edition)

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Now in paperback, a former Wall Street veteran, quarantined by the coronavirus, becomes consumed with madness—or the fulfillment of his own mythic fate; from author, actor, and musician David Duchovny

*While supplies last, books ordered through the website will include a bookplate SIGNED by David Duchovny!

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$15.95 $11.96

What people are saying…

“A lonely ex-financier stuck in his apartment during the Covid-19 pandemic becomes obsessed with the Central Park Reservoir and slowly goes mad.”
New York Times Book Review

“[Duchovny’s] novella The Reservoir, set in New York City, probes how pandemic isolation has changed us.”
Boston Globe

“Comically absurd, funny, and very dark.”
New York Journal of Books

“A new, pandemic-inspired, Rear Window-esque thriller, The Reservoir.”
Village Voice

“David Duchovny’s existentialist novella is not to be missed. [The Reservoir] is a novel of many well-crafted and complex lines [and] Duchovny’s writing is a combination of high and low—and yes, that distinction still exists, if barely. His metaphors and similes are arresting . . . The Reservoir is an important novel for how it captures, not just where we are now, but where we are forever. Disease—like Covid, or like tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain—takes us on a journey outward and at the same time inward.”
City Journal

“The progeny of our current pandemic is various: illness and death, of course, but also economic dislocation and personal isolation, the concept of ‘social distancing’ having quickly morphed from an advisory into a way of life. David Duchovny’s excellent new novella, The Reservoir, is a fever dream born out of this isolation.”
PopMatters

“David Duchovny writes like Bob Dylan, but in prose. There’s irony, poetry, there’s social commentary. There’s a brooding outrage. And there’s romance, too. The complex, multilayered novella, The Reservoir . . . is an easy-to-read, hard-to-forget page-turner.”
The Pavlovic Today

“Evocative, chilly prose that wouldn’t be out of place in a late Don DeLillo novel. Like his previous novels Bucky F*cking Dent and Miss Subways, it’s a love letter to Duchovny’s native New York. But it’s also a smart story about obsession. A slim, compelling tale of a man on the brink.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Bump [The Reservoir] to the top of your summer reading list immediately.”
CultureWag

“Inspired by Duchovny’s self-reflection while sequestered in his own aerie above Central Park at the height of the pandemic, this work is provocative, challenging, and not without its moments of dark humor.”
Library Journal

“This intelligent effort further burnishes Duchovny’s status as a gifted novelist.”
Publishers Weekly

“This swift and unnerving fever-dream of a novella, Duchovny’s fifth work of fiction, is saturated with mythic and literary allusions and shaped by resonant riffs on Poe and Mann. At once philosophical and suspenseful, grandly imaginative and sharply funny, this mind-bending story of delusion and longing is a dark reflection of New York’s countless crimes and tragedies and much-tested resilience, emblematic of the suffering and tenacity of all of humanity.”
Booklist

“This beautiful fever dream of a novella put me in mind of Gabriel García Márquez because of its sense of romance—and humor—in the midst of calamity. I’ll never look at Central Park the same way.”
—Amanda Peet

“A heartbreaking story of the cloaked complexities of father-daughter love framed as a sort of virtuoso suicide note. In its depiction of the breakthrough longings that come with growing older, it also struck me, wonderfully, as a contemporary Death in Venice.”
—Walter Kirn, author of Blood Will Out

“Biting and funny, The Reservoir is also deep and reflective. A mystery wrapped in a fever dream. A tale for our infectious times.”
—Chris Carter, director/writer, creator of The X-Files

“Equal parts Rear Window and The Plague, David Duchovny’s new novella is a wildly imaginative morality tale for these confounding times. With the Central Park Reservoir as his canvas, Duchovny paints a protagonist as quixotic as he is unreliable (or is he?). I had no idea where this story was headed, but I was down for the ride on every page.”
—T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes


Description

THIS PAGE IS FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION OF THE RESERVOIR; IF YOU’RE LOOKING TO PURCHASE A HARDCOVER COPY, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

This paperback edition features the brand-new bonus short story “The Scare Owl”

The Reservoir follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he looks back upon his life in his enforced quarantine solitude, wondering what it all means and who he really is.

Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is leads him on an epic quest that will ultimately tempt him with either delusional madness or the fulfillment of his own mythic fate.

Is he a dying man going mad or an everyman metamorphosing into a hero? Or both? We accompany Ridley as he leaves the safety of his apartment window to save the Fifth Avenue femme fatale and descends into a dangerous, increasingly surreal world of global conspiracies, madness, and sickness of this viral time. As Ridley’s actions grow more and more uncharacteristic, he realizes the key to all the mysteries of now, and even all of history, seem to lie deep beneath the freezing waters of the reservoir.

The Reservoir is a twisted rom-com for our distanced time, when the merest touch could kill and conspiracy theories propagate like viruses—a contemporary union of Death in Venice, Rear Window, and The Plague.

Read an excerpt from The Reservoir on Literary Hub.

Watch interviews with David Duchovny on The TODAY Show, The View, The Talk, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Good Day Chicago, New York Live, Los Angeles’s CBS 2, Los Angeles’s KTLA Morning News, and Amazon’s Author Fishbowl.

Listen to interviews with David Duchovny’s on The 500 with Josh Adam Meyers podcast, WNYCs All of It with Alison Stewart, Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver, Anna Faris is Unqualified, ON with Mario Lopez, Canada Now with Jeff Sammut, Brydon &, Roland’s Food Court, and The Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast.

Read a feature on David Duchovny in The Pavlovic Today, Yale Alumni Magazine and Village Voice.

Read David Duchovny’s interview with Boston Globe, Portland’s Sunrise (NBC), Yahoo Entertainment, and Closer Weekly.

Read a Q&A with David Duchovny from The Washington Post.


Book Details

  • Paperback: 128 pages
  • Published: 6/7/22
  • IBSN: 9781636141657
  • e-IBSN: 9781636140452
  • Hardcover
  • IBSN: 9781636140445

Author

DAVID DUCHOVNY is an award-winning actor, writer, director, New York Times best-selling author, and singer-songwriter. With an acting career spanning more than three decades, Duchovny is a two-time Golden Globe winner and four-time Emmy nominee. He is the author of four previous novels: Truly Like Lightning, Holy Cow, Bucky F*cking Dent, and Miss Subways. Duchovny adapted his novel Bucky F*cking Dent into a film he also directed, which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. As a musician, Duchovny has released three studio albums, Hell or Highwater, Every Third Thought, and Gestureland. The Reservoir is his most recent book.

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