"For lovers of unreliable narrators, this slim novel winds its reader into the narrator's like a deft and lethal spider."--Caroline Reilly, Forbes

"[A] slim, scholarly, sexy novel. . . . Complex and enigmatic; a book that defies both expectations and definition."--Kirkus Reviews

"An unrepentant and unreliable narrator propels this serpentine psychological drama. . . . This shape-shifting novel is endlessly intriguing."--Publishers Weekly

"[Attention-Seeking Behavior is] both slippery and spiky, illuminating and opaque, on occasion distressing, other times sexy, and often very funny. . . . As the book goes on, trying to discern fact from fiction in Aea's stories feels less and less like the point. Instead, we're made to examine the stories we tell about our own lives, how two people's differing versions of the same event might both prove to be true, how our memories trick us, and the myriad tiny ways in which we deceive both others and ourselves."--Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph (UK)

"Weird and compelling."--Financial Times (UK)

"A truly funny, slippery, and daring book that is suffused with enviable sentences, a sense of nowness, and this cynical intelligence that is a joy to interact with. It is a brash novel about deceit and love, companionship and interiority, politics and private jokes, sex and polygraph machines. It is a bold and exciting novel for the weary world of today."--John Patrick McHugh, author of Fun and Games

"At once a faultless expression of emotional truth and a work of heartbreaking precision and quality. You come away wondering if you've ever said an honest word. Human interactions feel stranger and yet more real. Mostly the effect is you end up wishing immediately for more work-- a lot more work--from this exceptional writer."--Ben Pester, author of The Expansion Project

"Attention-Seeking Behavior is unforgettable and diabolically fun. Its black humor and incisive observations buzz long after its conclusion. A thrilling debut novel I didn't know I'd been waiting for."--Tracy O'Neill, author of Woman of Interest

"I live for a protagonist who's both extremely self-aware and incredibly deluded, and Aea Varfis-van Warmelo nails that delightfully unnerving combo. Attention-Seeking Behavior deftly and with dry humor braids a compulsive liar's tall tales and her research on lie detection to interrogate language, performance, and what even is 'the truth.'"--Anna Dorn, author of Perfume and Pain

"Sexy, frightening, immaculately written and mercilessly perceptive. It's also the most exacting, eviscerating self-critique since St. Augustine. Left me with a deeper understanding of myself that I sort of wish I didn't have. I loved every page."--Luke Kennard, author of The Answer to Everything

"Aea Varfis-van Warmelo speaks with such clarity to the mutability of memory and self-narration, and the painful difficulty of breaking out of one's own patterns and specific self. Her honest look at lying has produced a novel which is both amazingly playful and deeply serious; warm and destabilizing, intellectually rigorous and aesthetically stylish."--Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies

"With Attention-Seeking Behavior, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo has done something that can't be undone. Both an essay on the comforting fantasy of lie detection and a kind of extended stress test on the boundary between literary forms, this book directs itself between the factitious and fictive with the elan of a magician. Quite literally, Varfis-van Warmelo goes now you see me, now you don't. But its achievement is not only its subject exploration of lies and contemporary intimacy, which feels entirely fresh, but in the way it demythologizes the writer as being safe from her own maladaptive predilections. Put another way, this book reminds me living (and loving) are both our diagnosis and our antidote. I can't think of a recent work that more clearly demonstrates that through literature we can lie to tell the truth."--Oluwaseun Olayiwola, author of Strange Beach

"Nimble, rigorous and almost indecently entertaining. A debut to celebrate, one that announces the arrival of a vital new talent."--Matt Greene, author of The Definitions

"Flips the reader-author dynamic on its head. Varfis-van Warmelo takes our projections to co-create a confessional fiction-nonfiction hybrid. Tricksy is high praise for this compelling debut."--Rose Cleary, author of How to Be a French Girl