Description
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'—and the sentences, matter-of-factly, towards the far reaches of the imagination: eerie, gruesome, funny, always delightful."—Rosmarie Waldrop.
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