Description
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 Bio
Joanna Ruocco is a prize-winning author and co-editor of the fiction journal Birkensnake. In 2013, she received the Pushcart Prize for her story "If the Man Took" and is also winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Ruocco received her MFA at Brown, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. She is the author of DAN, Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith-A Diptych, A COMPENDIUM OF DOMESTIC INCIDENTS, MAN'S COMPANIONS, THE MOTHERING COVEN, THE WEEK, and THE WHITMIRE CASE. She is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Wake Forest University.
Author City: WINSTON SALEM, NC USA