About the Author

Joanna Ruocco holds an MFA from Brown and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipses Press, 2009), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (which won the 2009 Noemi Press Fiction Chapbook Contest; judged by Rikki Ducornet) and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (which won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize; judged by Ben Marcus).

Reviews

“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

“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 Reviews

“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

“Dan is a town. A town among mountains, a town with a formerly bustling hosiery district, a town where doctors don’t believe in horses and principals go missing while seeking answers in the school basement. But what is Dan really? That is the question at the heart of Joanna Roucco’s unsettling (and laugh-out-loud funny) novel, told through a dizzying series of interactions, which themselves conjure memories of other interactions, which themselves often conjure even deeper memories still.” —Electric Lit

“Melba is subject to a lot of mansplaining!” —Full Stop

“Ruocco has an ear for sparkling absurdist dialogue and a sense of timing almost unmatched in contemporary American fiction . . . [Dan] is profoundly strange, but as readable and logical as the writing of Lewis Carroll.” —The Literary Review

“Like a skeleton key Ruocco has found combinations to unlock more doors then we knew we had. If for nothing else, read Dan for the sentences, and the way the words rub up against each other, placed so perfectly that you know they could not have otherwise been arranged.” —HTML Giant