Open Throat: A Novel

One of ELLE's Best Summer Books of 2023. Named a Most Anticipated Book by Buzzfeed and Literary Hub "Open Throat is a blinding spotlight beam of a book that I was completely unable and unwilling to put down." --Catherine Lacey. "My favorite book of this century so far." --Andrea Lawlor. "A fantastical, deeply moving, and original adventure." --Brontez Purnell A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel. A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity's foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call "ellay." As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one? Henry Hoke's Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.

Literature & Fiction

Hoke, Henry

Literary

Fiction. A shape-shifting presence named Genevieve unites these nine surreal stories, haunting the characters as they transcend and escape the traps of the everyday. Visions carried over from childish desire and imagination start to manifest in adulthood. In the mysteries that wake us up only to show us a new dream, Genevieve exists. "The stories in GENEVIEVES flit and flirt about the edges of different genres. Quirky and quietly unruly, these are the kinds of pieces Djuna Barnes might have written if she'd been born in the South on the verge of the 21st century."―Brian Evenson "Henry Hoke pushes the button on literary convention in this fierce and funny collection. GENEVIEVES is a weapon of mass re-creation that will take you to the highest point in the haunted levels of language."―Elisabeth Sheffield "In GENEVIEVES, Henry Hoke conjures up a beautiful yet broken America haunted by lost dreams and childhood secrets, but most of all haunted by language. The lyrical stories explore a space somewhere between Anne Carson and David Lynch. Written largely in crystallized fragments of prose, the stories are strung together like glittering and strange necklaces. When you look closely, you realize what you thought were plastic beads are actually bits of Halloween candy and the bones of birds. Try these stories on and see the world in a new way."―Lincoln Michel "Witty, startling, even macabre, GENEVIEVES is attuned to the nonexistent, and yet is so tethered to what is real, right in front of us, peeled back, laid bare, remarkably precise. The specters of this book index something just outside the periphery, questioning our relationship with the real. Sometimes alarming, sometimes telepathic, this is a stunning work."―Janice Lee

Genevieves

Subito Press

Picador

About the Author\nHenry Hoke is an editor at The Offing and a writer whose work has appeared in No Tokens, Triangle House, Electric Literature, and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. He co-created the performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles, and has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop. He lives in New York City.\nChristopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2013) and The End of Airports (2015) and co-editor of Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons.\nIan Bogost is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. Bogost is author or co-author of seven books: Unit Operations (2006), Persuasive Games (2007), Racing the Beam ( 2009), Newsgames (2010), How To Do Things with Videogames (2011), Alien Phenomenology (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and 10 PRINT CHR (205.5+RND(1)); : Goto 10 (2012). Bogost also creates videogames that cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally. His game A Slow Year, a collection of game poems for Atari, won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 Indiecade Festival.\n"A unique perspective on one of the most infamous cities in recent American history." - Publisher's Weekly 
"A book that sticks with you long after you've read it." Volume 1 Brooklyn 
"I will never forget this book." - T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls 
"Funny, nostalgic, and weird in the best possible way." - Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My Monticello 
Featured in Electric Lit's “The Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of 2022”\nObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.\nStickers adorn our first memories, dot our notebooks and our walls, are stuck annoyingly on fruit, and accompany us into adulthood to announce our beliefs from car bumpers. They hold surprising power in their ability to define and provoke, and hold a strange steadfast presence in our age of fading physical media. Henry Hoke employs a constellation of stickers to explore queer boyhood, parental disability, and ancestral violence.\nA memoir in 20 stickers, Sticker is set against the backdrop of the encroaching neo-fascist presence in Hoke's hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, which results in the fatal terrorist attack of August 12th and its national aftermath.\nObject Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Sticker (Object Lessons)

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Antiques & Collectibles

Bloomsbury Academic

Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. THE GROUNDHOG FOREVER, Henry Hoke's debut novel, shadows two film students in early-millennial Manhattan as they become stuck in the vicious sequel to a cherished movie. What follows is a high-concept novel of queer friendship, celebrity worship, and artistic immortality. Today is the last day of the best of your life. Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light, says of THE GROUNDHOG FOREVER, "In playful, exhilarating prose, Hoke pushes sentential limits, wryly examining the way art marks the world (and the many ways in which it fails to do so.)" Speed Levitch, author of Speedology says, "A gorgeous love letter to reality's unfolding, this beautifully written, magically real adventure paints a lucid, abstract-expressionistic kind-of-a-sensation of being limitless even while standing under the fluorescent lights of the institution."

The Groundhog Forever: A Novel

WTAW Press

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Books by Hoke, Henry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hoke, Henry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Open Throat: A Novel

Genevieves

Open Throat: A Novel

Sticker (Object Lessons)

The Groundhog Forever: A Novel