A short life of the author
Alexandra Kleeman (b. 1986) was born in Colorado and grew up between Colorado and Japan. She studied at Brown University and Columbia University. She teaches at the New School in New York.
Life and Career
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015) — her debut novel — follows three women (A, B, and C) in a world of relentless consumer culture, reality television, and bodily anxiety. The novel is strange, funny, and formally inventive — somewhere between DeLillo’s White Noise and a David Lynch film.
Intimations (2016) — a story collection — explores the same territory of the uncanny, the body, and the erosion of the boundary between self and world.
Something New Under the Sun (2021) — a climate-change noir set in a near-future Los Angeles where water has been replaced by a synthetic substitute — is her most ambitious work: a novel that uses genre conventions to explore environmental catastrophe and the failure of collective action.
Major Works and Themes
Kleeman writes about the body as a site of consumption, manipulation, and alienation. Her fiction is satirical but never cold — it’s animated by genuine anxiety about what it means to be embodied in a culture that commodifies everything.
Key Works
- You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015)
- Something New Under the Sun (2021)
Collecting Kleeman
First editions (Harper, 2015 and 2021) bring $15–$30. Kleeman is early in her career; collecting her now is a bet on future significance.