Precisely as strange, riotous, searing, and subversive as you'd want it to be. 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' She takes taxidermy seriously as a craft, not just as a device she makes it real and intimate. Arnett, transposing the metaphor out of the horror genre, closes the distance between viewer and viewed. taxidermy can, Arnett argues, bring us closer to life. The writing is subtle and meditative, with the tactile weight of dense fur. 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.-Ilana Masad 'NPR' a rock-solid family novel, brightened by its eccentric milieu.- 'Entertainment Weekly' Mostly Dead Things is very Florida, very gay, and very good. This book is my song of the summer.-Parul Sehgal 'The New York Times' 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. She writes comic set pieces to make you laugh, sex scenes to turn you on. There's none of the shyness and self-consciousness of so much American fiction that masks itself as austerity. Kristen Arnett is the queen of the Florida no one has ever told you about, and on every page she brings it to a steely and vivid life.-Alexander Chee, author of HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVELĪrnett possesses all the bravery her characters dream of. There's a gunslinger cool to every sentence, like someone is telling you the last story they'll ever tell you. If Heather Lewis and Joy Williams had a child it might be this-I don't think I've ever read a novel like it.

Book mostly dead things