Fiction. Mapping a utopia on the brink, THE MOTHERING COVEN's rare blend of charisma and pyrotechnic wordplay makes for an utterly original act of storytelling. Bertrand has disappeared from the house she shared with seven women--artists, scientists, and of course, witches. As the women plan a party for Mrs. Borage's hundredth birthday, Bertrand's absence threatens to dissolve the world they've created. "Deliriously imagined, THE MOTHERING COVEN is a work of wonder. Joanna Ruocco arrives: marvelous, and fully sprung!"--Carole Maso. "[A]n engagingly whimsical tale, graceful and inventive, with its own distinctive lexicon"--Robert Coover.

The Mothering Coven

Literature & Fiction

Ruocco, Joanna

Contemporary

Ellipsis Press

Fiction. For the characters in MAN'S COMPANIONS, the self is a degraded version of someone else. Fantasy is stymied by performance anxiety. Delayed gratification phones in a last-minute cancellation. The fictions in this collection are mongrel, troubling the genus of story with miscegenations and mutations, and at the heart of the book is the figure of the anima non grata, the unwanted woman, a degraded version of man. Using language by turns digressive, obsessive, overblown, romantic, fickle, and mundane, MAN'S COMPANIONS manipulates feminine tropes and finds a kind of joyous liberty in its proliferation of thwarted affairs and awkward interludes.

Man’s Companions

Short Stories & Anthologies

Tarpaulin Sky Press

Fiction. Melba Zuzzo, erstwhile innocent of the male-heavy hamlet of Dan, a town located in the foothills of ... somewhere? ... finds herself in a rut. In fact she was probably born into this rut, but today, for some reason, she feels suddenly aware of it. Everything is changing, yet nothing is making sense. The people she might rely upon, the habits she should find comforting—everything is off. It's as if life, which has gone by largely unnoticed up to now, has been silently conspiring against her the whole time. In DAN, Joanna Ruocco has created a slapstick parable that brings together the restless undercurrents and unabashed campiness of Thomas Pynchon with the meandering imaginative audacity of Raymond Roussel. Either Dan is a state of mind, beyond the reach of any physical map, or else it sits on every map unnoticed, tucked beneath the big red dot that tells us YOU ARE HERE. "Ruocco spins unusual shapes out of language, but not because her interests are narrowly linguistic. By reshaping language, she redefines the world it conjures forth. Her fiction so often flirts with the fantastic perhaps because she understands that when language stops operating according to its ordinary rules, it creates an alternate reality, swerving away from what normally counts as 'real.'?"—The Nation "Ruocco is consistently inventive. She tilts the world as we know it, challenging our senses."—Triquarterly "Joanna Ruocco's DAN is a tiny novel that packs a massive punch."—Bustle "Ruocco has given serious thought to how much she can do with language while still preserving a story's integrity... Modernist-style experimentation ain't dead yet. Giddy, intriguing stuff from a writer eager to let words misbehave."—Kirkus "Ruocco's work is cutting-edge, pushing the established tropes within contemporary fiction, calling her readers to interpret and examine the nuances of seemingly everyday life."—Publishers Weekly "This outrageously hilarious book is also a warning against how others will happily use our hope, our empathy, and our imaginations against us... even while they are eating our hot pretzels."—Drunken Boat "This novel is funny and smart but knows how to balance both deftly enough to create a genuine world out of the completely obtuse."—ASKMEN

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Dorothy, a publishing project

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Art. THE WEEK presents models of minds shaped by the 21st century American realities that they also construct. The stories are unconventional in their arcs and uses of characterization, and in their foregrounding of the instabilities in representational practices; they obsess over life and death, female sexuality and family, the economy and language and try out various forms inadequate to their figuration/expression.

The Week

The Elephants

Stark and vibrant, the two halves of this sutured book expose the Frankenstein-like scars of the assemblage we call “human.” In “Another Governess” a woman in a decaying manor tries to piece together her own story. In “The Least Blacksmith” a man cannot help but fail his older brother as they struggle to run their father’s forge.   Each of the stories stands alone, sharing neither characters nor settings. But together, they ask the same question: What are the wages of being? The relentless darkness of these tales is punctured by hope—the violent hope of the speaking subject.

Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych

United States

Fiction Collective 2

Fiction. A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS explores the notion of intimate space and the domestic affairs that constitute the proper subject of female knowledge. The prose pieces echo one another, but instead of creating one narrative they rather inhabit a shared terrain, the private realm where the playful, the erotic, the violent are compressed into a single gesture, something as quotidian as cutting the goose's neck for dinner. Through spells, visions, fragments, and tableaux, A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS creates a frightening map of women's wisdom. "In these linked stories, two girls 'run, hatless, towards anything, a bridge, a public toilet, a street light, an iron chair'&mdash;and the sentences, matter-of-factly, towards the far reaches of the imagination: eerie, gruesome, funny, always delightful."&mdash;Rosmarie Waldrop.

A Compendium of Domestic Incidents

Literary

Noemi Press

Fiction. Joanna Ruocco and Joanna Howard's collaborative novella FIELD GLASS sets forth a near-future war in which the terrain of the occupied shifts every day. This war—where relationships between humans and machines are rendered real through event logs and dispatches—hinges on an imagined evolution where the natural sciences merge with an amplified technology. Brought to life with antique flourish, high mannerisms, and pastoral motifs in familiar yet unrecognizable locales, FIELD GLASS asks how we might build an imaginary world on the ruins of an occupied one. With each transmission, Ruocco and Howard artfully underscore the suspicion that "surely our mysteries define us." "Howard and Ruocco present us with a collaborative fiction that only could have been written under ground, among hovel-dwelling radicals, post- apocalyptic profiteers, beneath the murmuring of machinery, in the inversion of the field; orchestrating a literature of failure, where the supposedly long-dead I bursts from the We in the most concerted moments of togetherness, bringing forth an intense perpetual dislocation and vivid hilarity.—Renee Gladman

Field Glass

Howard, Joanna

Sidebrow Books

Volume 10 of the Heavy Feather Review literary annual. Featuring fiction by Joanna Ruocco, Eleanor Levine, Tyler Barton, and Alex Behr. Poetry by Parker Tettleton, Ori Fienberg, and Jessie Janeshek. A material index by Mike Corrao. And much more.

Heavy Feather Review Vol. 10

Barton, Tyler

Janeshek, Jessie

Heavy Feather Review

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