Large Animals
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
"...joins in with the classics of loaded, outlaw literature... this is an electric debut. - Maggie Nelson
"Everything in Jess Arndt's Large Animals veers towards the supernatural. Everything is strangely bodily and shape-shifting. Hugely original, this debut is wild." - Isabel Waidner
"Jess Arndt has crafted a queer uncanny, an eerily recognizable landscape of dark magic and darker humor where the instability of bodies, desire, relationships, and the self take on a supernatural dimension. A tremendously exciting collection. - Michelle Tea
A bold, soupy, and cannily queer collection of stories that confronts what it means to have a body.
Daring, witty, and strange, the twelve stories in Large Animals confront what it means to have a body. Jess Arndt's often-unnamed narrators battle with inhabiting a form that makes them feel both deeply uncomfortable and detached, constantly challenging the limits of gender and reality as they try to connect with other people and with themselves. These are stories that rebel against accepted ideas of human identity and present a new normal that is as ambiguous as it is messy.
In 'Moon Colonies' the narrator's disconnect with their body leads them on a masochistic gambling spree. In 'Jeff', Lily Tomlin mistakes Jess for Jeff, triggering a hilarious and unhinged identity crisis. And in 'Contrails', a character calls each of their ex lovers the night before surgery, confronting a gut-twisting fear of becoming non-existent.
Visceral and often disconcerting, Large Animals sets a new standard for language, challenging our concepts of gender and body in a way that feels radical, insightful, and incredibly relevant.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arndt's short stories are delicious flights of fancy, or obsession, or fertile curiosity or, more accurately, some beguiling combination of all three. All 12 pieces in her debut collection are written in the first person. It could arguably be the same narrator in each, perhaps the author herself or not. Often the stories seem to end abruptly, albeit usually meaningfully. "La Gueule de Bois" riffs on a trip to Paris, "the city whose sole monument is a comically upturned syringe." "Jeff" features a brief encounter with Lily Tomlin. "Can You Live with It" juxtaposes musings on Raskolnikov and Crime and Punishment with a kind of pub crawl through various colorful bars. "Moon Colonies" explores tacky, yet strangely beautiful Atlantic City: "In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor." In "Third Arm," which is full of puckish phrases "the gag of cars," "a pudgy dark had descended" the narrator feels herself at odds with her rebellious body. And in "Together," the longest and most plot-driven story, a couple contracts a mysterious malady that slowly breaks them apart. This is a playful and provocative collection, full of sly, deft turns of phrase and striking imagery.
