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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

MOSTLY DEAD THINGS

Kristen Arnett

“Arnett possesses all the bravery her characters dream of. There's none of the shyness and self-consciousness of so much American fiction that masks itself as austerity. She writes comic set pieces to make you laugh, sex scenes to turn you on. The action flips from the past to the present, swimming through first love and first grief on a slick of red Kool-Aid and vodka, suntan oil and fruity lip gloss, easy and unforced. This book is my song of the summer.”
- Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Esquire, The Week, BuzzFeed, NYLON, Bustle, HuffPost, The Boston Globe, and more.

One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo's wife-and the only person Jessa's ever been in love with-walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother's art escalates-picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose-and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them.

Kristen Arnett's debut novel is a darkly funny, heart-wrenching, and eccentric look at loss and love.

Kristen Arnett is the NYT bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, '19). She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter's Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award. She is a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at Black Mountain Institute. You can find her on Twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett
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Published 2019-06-01 by Tin House Books

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Optioned, details to come

https://www.bustle.com/p/mostly-dead-things-author-kirsten-arnett-on-the-weird-wonderful-magic-of-central-florida-18136312

“The writing is subtle and meditative, with the tactile weight of dense fur . . . taxidermy can, Arnett argues, bring us closer to life . . . . Arnett, transposing the metaphor out of the horror genre, closes the distance between viewer and viewed. She takes taxidermy seriously as a craft, not just as a device; she makes it real and intimate . . . it gives readers a fresh way to think about fiction itself, which lives, or half lives, on the rippling cusp of the real.” Read more...

Corsair Books (imprint of Little, Brown UK)

The Best Books of 2019: This début novel follows a taxidermist, Jessa-Lynn, who lives in central Florida and is mourning the death of her father. Jessa-Lynn's lover, who is also her brother's wife, has run off. Her mother is taking apart her father's specimens—he, too, was a taxidermist—and turning them into erotic art installations. Black humor meets lush prose; Arnett's Florida—a world of sensuousness and danger—expresses the freedom that her characters seek, as taxidermy itself becomes a figure for queerness, sex, art, and loss. Read more...

Summer book preview: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/books/writers-to-watch-this-summer-kristen-arnett-tope-folarin-jean-kwok-deshawn-charles-winslow.html Book lover's guide to summer: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/books/the-book-lovers-guide-to-summer.html Vanity Fair summer book guide: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/photos/2019/05/summer-books-to-read And a few more lists that mention the book: Alma's favorite books for summer 2019: https://www.heyalma.com/almas-favorite-books-for-summer-2019/?utm_content=bufferc47ae&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Bustle, 50 New Books for summer: https://www.bustle.com/p/50-new-books-of-summer-2019-to-read-by-the-pool-in-the-park-on-the-beach-17909816 Nylon, 35 great books to read this summer: https://bit.ly/2JBFcOz EW summer books preview: https://ew.com/books/2019/05/23/summer-books-preview-2019/ Washington Post summer beach reads 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2019/05/22/looking-best-summer-beach-reads-follow-lead-these-dc-area-authors/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ab19f342ef81 Oprah Mag, 41 LGTBQ books to read this summer: https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/books/g26428720/best-lgbtq-books-2019/

HarperCollins Brazil

In Arnett's dark and original debut, Jessa discovers her father dead of a suicide in the family's Florida taxidermy shop. She also finds a note asking her to take care of the failing business, her mother, and her brother, Milo. Additionally, Jessa mourns the loss of Brynn, her brother's (now) ex-wife and Jessa's longtime lover, who left both her and Milo years before. As Jessa grieves over her lost loved ones, she must also deal with her remaining ones: Milo sinks from the world, missing work and barely paying attention to his children, and Jessa's mother enters a late creative period, using the stuffed and mounted animals from the shop to make elaborate sexual tableaus for a local art gallery. Jessa also begins a romantic relationship with Lucinda, the director of the gallery and benefactor for Jessa's mother's newfound (and, for Jessa, “perverted”) artistry. Set in a richly rendered Florida and filled with delightfully wry prose and bracing honesty, Arnett's novel introduces a keenly skillful author with imagination and insight to spare. (June) Read more...

Jessa-Lynn Morton grew up and stayed put in central Florida, learning taxidermy from her father and then keeping his shop afloat after he commits suicide. She drinks too much and helps raise her niece and nephew after their mother, Jessa's sister-in-law and also, inconveniently, the love of her life, abandons them. Her mother makes obscene art using animals Jessa has preserved. Making a list of what's quirky about this debut novel from Arnett, author of the story collection Felt in the Jaw (2017), is too tempting to resist, but these quirks also serve as the novel's starting points. Arnett's writing cuts through all the unusualness and renders Jessa human and relatable. Jessa lives in a world of pain with little clue how to cope, and Arnett doesn't sugarcoat her or her Florida home. Both are described in unapologetically unvarnished terms: sour-smelling armpits, popped-zit gore on mirrors, garbage, rot, and roadkill. The novel alternates its storytelling between before Jessa's love abandoned the family and after. Florida animal species structure the before chapters, and their taxidermy is described in detail. The squeamish may struggle to read about Jessa's life, but readers who persevere will be both compelled and rewarded. — Emily Dziuban Read more...

"song of the summer", "Arnett possesses all the bravery her characters dream of. There's none of the shyness and self-consciousness of so much American fiction that masks itself as austerity. She writes comic set pieces to make you laugh, sex scenes to turn you on. The action flips from the past to the present, swimming through first love and first grief on a slick of red Kool-Aid and vodka, suntan oil and fruity lip gloss, easy and unforced." Read more...

“It's darkly funny, both macabre and irreverent, and its narrator is so real that every time I stopped reading the book, I felt a tiny pull at the back of my mind, as if I'd left a good friend in the middle of a conversation.” —NPR