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Meaningful Work
Winner of FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize A stunning look at the labor of obsession and the industry of self-destruction In her lush, lyrical, and unflinching short fiction debut, JoAnna Novak examines the restless throb of desire amid the rote work of jobs and obligations, from the walk-ins of a New York banquet kitchen to the pier of Venice Beach. Fueled by jellyfish pad Thai and Necco wafers, Mountain Dew and Xiaolongbao, the characters in these stories defy boundaries and mores: In "MEMO 19," a former anorectic, bored of recovery and her clerical job, invites an unparalleled act of sexual defilement and in "Rio Grande, Wisconsin," a fleshly preteen fantasizes about Bill Murray on a family vacation to Wisconsin. Celebrating the grueling beauty of the shift and the ticking virtues of self-restraint, Meaningful Work is a pageant of formal experimentation, in fearless, glittering prose.
I Must Have You
The year is 1999, and thirteen-year-old Elliot is a self-appointed "diet coach" who teaches her classmates how to survive on one stick of gum a day to get heroin-chic, Kate Moss thin. Elliot is obsessed with her best friend and former "client" Lisa, who is fresh out of inpatient treatment and dating a nineteen-year-old drug dealer. Meanwhile, Elliot's mother Anna, a capricious poetry professor, has a drug addiction and eating disorder of her own. When Lisa transfers her fixation from food to sex with her boyfriend, Elliot's fragile grip on reality begins to falter, at the same that time that Anna's fascination with the object of her own blind lust, the student who relinquishes his cocaine to...
Domestirexia
A poetry collection contorting the idea of home away from being a site of comfort and nourishment by coaxing the reader to think about domesticity in knotty new ways Domestirexia goes beyond the entanglement of "domestic" and "anorexia” exploring a behind-closed-doors sensuality, borne in the concept of making home. Home can be a space of both resistance and discomfort that one desires or takes pleasure in enjoying. Rote notions of home and the domestic are reimagined in these poems as estranging, excessive, and populated by unknowable characters. Exploring themes of family, sacrifice, disease, death, money, cooking, romance, sex, art, and the visceral qualities of the everyday, the poems twist themselves into binds for the reader to undo or surrender to. Quarantined at her in-law’s house during Covid, Novak wrote these poems while watching The Great British Baking Show, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, skimming Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and babysitting an infant. These are poems about wanting to misbehave. Light voyeurism at home, with gin and cake.
Noirmania
A cortege of modern death. A poem.
The Secret Sister
After a painful divorce, Maisey Lazarow returns to the small island off the North Carolina coast where she grew up. Upon finding a box of old photographs, Maisey and her brother Keith begin to uncover distant memories of a little girl who they believe was their sister. Their mother claims there was no sister, but Maisey is convinced there was. So where is she now?
Death Industrial Complex
Poetry. Art. Photography. Candice Wuehle's DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX is a meditation on the cultural obsession with the bodies of dead women and an occult invocation of the artist Francesca Woodman. Like Woodman's photographs with their long exposures and blurred lenses, this book is haunted and haunting, hazey yet devastatingly precise. These are poems as possessions, gothic ekphrases, dialogues with the dead, biography and anti-biography, a stunning act of "cryptobeauty."
The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
Part coming-of-age story, part mystery, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is a quirky and utterly charming debut about a community in need of absolution and two girls learning what it means to belong.
Contradiction Days
For readers of Rachel Cusk and Maggie Nelson, the rapturous memoir of a soon-to-be-mother whose obsession with the reclusive painter Agnes Martin threatens to upend her life Five months pregnant and struggling with a creative block, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the enigmatic abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is drawn to the contradictions in Martin’s life as well as her art—the soft and exacting brushstrokes she employs for grid-like compositions that are both rigid and dreamy. But what most calls to JoAnna is Martin’s dedication to her work in the face of paranoid schizophrenia. Uneasy with the changes her pregnant body is undergoing, JoAnna relapses into damaging...
Abeyance, North America
Poetry. Women's Study. California Interest. A redacted atlas of longing, a transcontinental tour guided by eros, ABEYANCE, NORTH AMERICA is an exploration of submission and desire. Moving between real and imaginary spaces, the poems comprise a travelogue both geographical and emotional. Novak interrogates the ways in which place can amplify the erotic, and how fantasies can interrupt or alter landscapes.
