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.

Author City: DENVER, CO USA

Joanna Ruocco is the author of A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS (Noemi Press, 2011), MAN'S COMPANIONS (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), and the novel THE MOTHERING COVEN (Ellipsis Press, 2009). She co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She recently won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize for Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith-A Diptych. The judge was Ben Marcus. This book will be published by FC2 in Spring 2012. She currently resides in Denver, Colorado.

Reviews and Other Links
Benjamin Gottlieb in Art+Culture
David Carroll Simon @ The Nation
Publishers Weekly
David Carroll Simon @ The Nation
Hana Park @ TriQuarterly Online