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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Bu hikaye Poets & Writers Magazine dergisinin July - August 2017 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
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