whose debut story collection, Large Animals, was published in May by Catapult.
MANY people, myself included, have been eagerly awaiting a first book from Jess Arndt for some time, and now here is Large Animals, a wicked sliver of a collection that both exceeds expectations and provides innumerable deep pleasures. It’s whip-smart, innovative, rollicking, hard-core, and sweet all at once. The world’s so lucky for it. I had the chance to talk briefly with Arndt about its publication, in L.A., where we both live.
I’m so interested in how you went about thinking about and making your “first book.” Do you think of it as a compendium of the best of everything you’ve written to date? Or was it a more specific project that left a lot of writing on the cutting-room floor?
I think a first book is an insanity. Getting here was white-knuckling it for ten years, on hope fumes. It’s kind of like: There was going to be a first book, and who knew what shape it would be? It could have been anything. An entirely other novel, for instance; I also had that. That said, there was a distinct moment when my work turned, where I stopped using fiction as something to duck under and instead employed it more hack-scientifically, like a lineup of funky, mostly out of-focus microscopes turned inward. I always have a hard t ime talk ing, a hard t ime knowing myself, a hard time in language. Once the writing could be about that, things got a tiny bit easier and these odd shaped “stories,” if that’s what they are, started to emerge then, through sheer will.
Do you think of the whole collection as kind of one song, à la Jesus’ Son, or do you think of the pieces more discretely?
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