Mostly dead things - Kristen Arnett

'Messed-up families, scandalous love affairs, art, life, death and the great state of Florida in one delicious, darkly funny package. Kristen Arnett is a wickedly talented and a wholly original voice' Jami Attenberg

'There's a gunslinger cool to every sentence . . . Kristen Arnett is the queen of the Florida no one has ever told you about' Alexander Chee

'The writing is subtle and meditative, with the tactile weight of dense fur' The New Yorker

One Florida morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into her family's 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 falls apart.

Her mother decides to process her feelings by making aggressively lewd and increasingly disturbing art pieces with her dead husband's taxidermied animals. Her brother withdraws and struggles to cope. His wife - who is also the only person Jessa has ever been in love with - walks out without a word. Meanwhile, numb with lack of sleep and too much alcohol, Jessa starts to seek less-than-legal ways of generating income to keep the shop afloat.

The Mortons have reached tipping point. But for the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people she calls family truly are and, ultimately, how she fits alongside them.

Kristen Arnett is the New York Times bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things. 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 the New York Times, North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review, 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

Messed-up families, scandalous love affairs, art, life, death and the great state of Florida in one delicious, darkly funny package. Kristen Arnett is wickedly talented and a wholly original voice
Jami Attenberg

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.
New York Times

Hilarious, deeply morbid and full of heart
BuzzFeed

The novel explores love, life and death and is guaranteed to keep you gripped throughout
Mirror

Its humor is as dark and glinting as the black plastic eye of a taxidermy ferret
Nylon

The writing is subtle and meditative, with the tactile weight of dense fur . . . 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
The New Yorker

A dark and oftentimes comedic tale of love and loss
Evening Standard

I don't think I've ever read a novel like it . . . Kristen Arnett is the queen of the Florida no one has ever told you about

A gorgeously twisted story
Vanity Fair

Wonderful
Guardian

Florida's literary renaissance charges onward with this heartfelt, one-of-a-kind novel
Esquire