ISBN: 1937512827 9781937512828

Category: Fiction / Literary

Page count: 171

<p>*Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards for Novel<br>*The Believer Book Awards, 2019: Editors' Longlists in Fiction<br>*The Northern California ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2019, Fiction longlist<br>*2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist<br>*A Best Book of 2019 —Vulture, Entropy, Buzzfeed, Thrillist</p><p>"Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything.” —Roxane Gay, author of <i>Bad Feminist</i></p><p>"I loved every page of this gorgeous, grotesque, heartbreaking novel." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties</p><p>A surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men.</p><p><i>The Book of X</i> tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday — school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents — with the surreal — rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats — Cassie’s realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.</p>