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Mostly Dead Things Hardcover – June 4, 2019

by Kristen Arnett (Author)

3.8 1,411 ratings

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The celebrated New York Times Bestseller

A Best Book of the Year pick at the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, TIME, Washington Post, Oprahmag.com, Thrillist, Shelf Awareness, Good Housekeeping and more.

What does it take to come back to life? For Jessa-Lynn Morton, the question is not an abstract one. In the wake of her father’s suicide, Jessa has stepped up to manage his failing taxidermy business while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the taxidermy shop to make provocative animal art, while her brother, Milo, withdraws. And Brynn, Milo’s wife―and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with―walks out without a word. It’s not until the Mortons reach a tipping point that a string of unexpected incidents begins to open up surprising possibilities and second chances. But will they be enough to salvage this family, to help them find their way back to one another? Kristen Arnett’s breakout bestseller is a darkly funny family portrait; a peculiar, bighearted look at love and loss and the ways we live through them together.

Print length

354 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Tin House Books
Publication date

June 4, 2019
Dimensions

5.9 x 1.2 x 8.9 inches
ISBN-10

1947793306
ISBN-13

978-1947793309
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Arnett possesses all the bravery her characters dream of. There’s none of the shyness and self-consciousness of so much American fiction that masks itself as austerity. She writes comic set pieces to make you laugh, sex scenes to turn you on. The action flips from the past to the present, swimming through first love and first grief on a slick of red Kool-Aid and vodka, suntan oil and fruity lip gloss, easy and unforced. This book is my song of the summer."
― Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"Mostly Dead Things is very Florida, very gay, and very good... a rock-solid family novel, brightened by its eccentric milieu."
― Entertainment Weekly

"It's darkly funny, both macabre and irreverent, and its narrator is so real that every time I stopped reading the book, I felt a tiny pull at the back of my mind, as if I'd left a good friend in the middle of a conversation."
― NPR

"The writing is subtle and meditative, with the tactile weight of dense fur . . . taxidermy can, Arnett argues, bring us closer to life . . . . Arnett, transposing the metaphor out of the horror genre, closes the distance between viewer and viewed. She takes taxidermy seriously as a craft, not just as a device; she makes it real and intimate . . . it gives readers a fresh way to think about fiction itself, which lives, or half lives, on the rippling cusp of the real."
― The New Yorker

"Precisely as strange, riotous, searing, and subversive as you’d want it to be. And, yes, its humor is as dark and glinting as the black plastic eye of a taxidermy ferret. . . . [A] celebration of the strangeness of life and love and loss, all of it as murky as a Florida swamp but beautiful in its wildness."
― NYLON

"Mostly Dead Things suggests, above all else, that love is not something to be conquered, killed, skinned and mounted. It is living, and a verb. What we do for love ― be it build erotic buffalo sculptures in grief-stricken homage, steal peacocks, raise someone else’s children, collect roadkill ― is so much more powerful than what we think about it."
― San Francisco Chronicle

"Set in a richly rendered Florida and filled with delightfully wry prose and bracing honesty, Arnett’s novel introduces a keenly skillful author with imagination and insight to spare."
― Publishers Weekly

"Arnett depicts the Morton family’s struggles with tenderness and humanity, as well as streaks of deliciously black humor. Far more than just a book-length Florida Man story, Mostly Dead Things broke our hearts in the best possible way."
― Apple Books

"Arnett is a talented and original writer, and everybody paying attention to her work will be eagerly awaiting whatever else she has in store."
― Shelf Awareness, starred review

"Hilarious, deeply morbid, and full of heart."
― BuzzFeed

"It’s the kind of book that sneaks up on you, the kind you read until you realize you have to pee or that the light has left the room. Her writing is accessible and feels like reading a thought from your own brain you weren’t aware of thinking, tapping into experiences of adulthood and gayness and longing that you might think you were the only one to have."
― Autostraddle

"Mostly Dead Things is a phenomenal novel about family, taxidermy, and queerness. You’ll devour this bizarre, brilliant book."
― Hello Giggles

"This slice of Sunshine State gothic has instant classic written all over it. Everything you find both weird and beautiful about Florida has been packaged up and turned into one of this year’s best debut novels."
― Inside Hook

"An ambitious debut writer with extraordinary promise, Arnett brings all of Florida's strangeness to life through the lens of a family snowed under with grief."
― Kirkus

"An incisive and peculiar study of grief. ... Arnett writes about how we have to overcome our first understanding of the world in order to process it as an adult. She uses the language of taxidermy to explore the memories that ripple beneath our longest held beliefs."
― the Star-Tribune

""More than about death, it is also a novel about intimacy and wanting what is forbidden, about childhood and family, about absent parents and absent lovers, and about the secondhand self-destruction that can be wrought by ignoring cries of the heart.""
― America Magazine

"A worthy addition to the new Florida canon: a highly engrossing, extremely promising, sad, and very funny first novel about sex and death."
― Boston Globe

"Mostly Dead Things is one of the strangest and funniest and most surprising first novels I’ve ever read. A love letter to Florida and to family, to half-lit swamps and the 7/11, and to the beasts that only pretend to hold their poses inside us. In Kristen Arnett’s expert hands, taxidermy becomes a language to capture our species’ impossible and contradictory desire to be held and to be free."
― Karen Russell, author of SWAMPLANDIA!

"If Heather Lewis and Joy Williams had a child it might be this―I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel like it. There’s a gunslinger cool to every sentence, like someone is telling you the last story they’ll ever tell you. Kristen Arnett is the queen of the Florida no one has ever told you about, and on every page she brings it to a steely and vivid life."
― Alexander Chee, author of HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

"Mostly Dead Things packs messed-up families, scandalous love affairs, art, life, death and the great state of Florida into one delicious, darkly funny package. Kristen Arnett is wickedly talented and a wholly original voice"
― Jami Attenberg, author of ALL GROWN UP

"Kristen Arnett has written a portrait of an American family grieving their dead and their living, and lovingly tearing one another to shreds in the process. Too, this is a book about salvaging, about the Mortons’ refusal to abandon what remains, to be buoys and coconspirators for one another’s hearts. Mostly Dead Things is a vicious and tender beast, alive with wry humor and the undeniable beauty of the ways we love."
― Danielle Lazarin, author of BACK TALK

About the Author

Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer. She won the 2017 Coil Book Award for her debut short fiction collection, Felt in the Jaw, and was awarded Ninth Letter’s 2015 Literary Award in Fiction. She lives in Florida. Follow her on Twitter @Kristen_Arnett.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tin House Books; First Edition (June 4, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 354 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1947793306
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1947793309
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #684,181 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #565 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books)
- #14,110 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #33,499 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.8 1,411 ratings

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3.8 out of 5

1,411 global ratings

5 star		34%
4 star		30%
3 star		23%
2 star		8%
1 star		5%

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Walter Desmond

Evocative and Memorable Despite some of its Content

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 21, 2023

Verified Purchase

Morbid, sad, ugly, vile and disturbing, the novel nevertheless contains passages that are evocative, compassionate and powerfully rendered, especially when Arnett shows her protagonist Jessa in one-to-one encounters with her father, her mother, her brother, her nephew and her niece. In fact, it is in these quieter segments that the novel soars and is significant. If you can get past the ugliness and the pain and the terrible sadness that radiates from all the taxidermied animals, you might discover something poignant about family relationships that knocks at the heart. Arnett's diction, imagery and descriptive writing are oddly interesting. Ultimately, I came away with the feeling that I had read an important novel.

Helpful

mhs26

Good Writing, Weak Plot

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

Mostly Dead Things is a story about a woman who's dealing with the aftermath of her father's suicide. She takes over his taxidermy business in lieu of his death as he entrusted in her to take care of the family after he was gone. The story centers around a love triangle, loss (of life and love), and troubled family dynamics.

This is one of those books that I wanted to like more than I did. I follow Arnett on Twitter and have read some of her articles so I enjoy her writing style, however, this book just didn't do it for me. She writes well. I enjoy her voice and tone. However, the plot just wasn't there for me. I actually prefer character driven narratives as opposed to plot driven ones, but this book felt relatively pointless. We see the protagonist struggling with holding her family together, dealing with her failed romances, and coming to terms with her father's suicide, but not a lot happens. Every other chapter is a flashback which I don't mind, but not a lot was revealed through them other than what her relationship was like with the woman she loved. Perhaps if over time we were revealing the relationship itself it might have been different, but we learn very early on about the relationship and the strangeness of it. Everything after is just giving us a sense of what it was like between them which frankly was a lot less interesting than the salaciousness of the love triangle. I didn't really feel like the character changed at all other than maybe understanding her mom better. Perhaps she wasn't interesting enough for me to care that much.

One thing that I appreciate about this book is that the protagonist is unapologetically queer. Her sexuality isn't a plot point, it simply is who she is. That's refreshing, of course not surprising for Arnett who frequently writes and tweets about her sexuality.

Overall this book just wasn't for me I guess. There's something I really liked about it. It's very honest and "real" despite its oddities, but it didn't do enough to hold my interest or make me ponder anything more than what it is. I would definitely read other books by Arnett as I think she's a good writer and an interesting, funny person, but this one was a bit of a miss for me.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

MW Brooke

one of the best books i've read in years

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

wow, what a find. thank you to Tin House for being such a reputable publisher; i know that pretty much anything i pick up with their name on it is going to be great, and Mostly Dead Things is quite truly fantastic. i wouldn't hesitate to say that it's easily one of the best books i've read in years.

a deeply strange slice of life novel set in the almost otherworldy state of Florida, Mostly Dead Things centers on Jessa, a third-generation taxidermist determined to keep the family business afloat after the sudden suicide of her father. Jessa herself and the supporting characters refuse to be painted with a broad brush of any kind; i found myself transfixed as each one formed on the page and then evolved before my very eyes, dashing my initial assessments as i read on. Arnett weaves a very tight narrative: each chapter feels almost self-contained in a way, pushing toward a larger plot and character arc. each sentence so beautifully constructed, not a single word is wasted, and the pacing is pitch perfect. the use of metaphor is breathtaking in some places; i found myself putting the book down on multiple occasions to really think about the way she utilizes language to convey certain emotions and tone. Arnett is a true master of her craft. as an aspiring writer myself, this novel has informed so much of what i want to convey to readers of my own work. i can't wait to read more of her work.

while a majority of the novel is quite intense and at times depressing--right out the gate the book tackles suicide, grief, poverty, family dysfunction, and yes, very graphic details of the grizzly art of taxidermy--what really sealed my love for this book is how Arnett balances that depressing content with what i consider to be a very hopeful, fitting ending. Arnett seems unafraid of letting her heroine triumph in the end, a result of tangible growth that is earned. in my academic career, i've found that many literary novels opt to take a pessimistic route with their narratives; while i intellectually understand the intent of many of these texts for doing so, i personally find nihilistic philosophy tired and exhausting to read. so, without spoiling the end, i will say that i was pleasantly surprised with how Arnett wraps up the final few chapters, and how she positions Jessa in the last few paragraphs. to me, it is beautiful and resonant, and Jessa's strength shines radiantly as the strong queer woman protagonist i've until now only dreamed of reading about.

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kindle Customer Charlie 82

Interesting, unusual childhood of a girl

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 21, 2021

Verified Purchase

I was surprised when I got to the core of the story about her family , especially her father. Her relationship with him determined her life and much of her story. Arnett was honest and she shared parts of this life of a family that might seem shocking, but interesting and certainly entertaining, which help to keep the reader involved, anxious to see what comes next. Best part for me was Arnett's characterization of each individual. They felt like people I have known
In my own life at some time in the 50's. You won't be sorry for reading this one.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

W. A. Burt

Nobody can ever know another person.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 28, 2020

Verified Purchase

This was too much of a stop/start read for me.Every time the taxidermy sequences kicked in the storyline stalled.At times I felt as though I had signed up for an online course.
The characters were interesting enough and with more development,tighter editing and less intrusion from animals and their innards this could have been so much better.

One person found this helpful

Mr. Matthew P. Jones

Weird, wonderful and touching

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

A great read!! Weird, wonderful and touching. Would highly recommend

2 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer

Beautiful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 21, 2021

Verified Purchase

Initially I didn't think I you take to this book, it's description is wonderful and vivid.. Even in relation to taxidermy. However it is very beautifully written and well worth your time

Book Club Junky

The biggest Black Comedy

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on March 24, 2020

Verified Purchase

Not the most comfortable read due to the graphic nature of the material, however it is truly unique.
The most of the characters are creatively flawed in different ways. The bizarre relationships, with each other, death, sex & taxidermy fashion a black comedy that made me cringe & laugh out loud.

Jon C. Reed

Mainly Dead Things

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on December 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

Just couldn't get into it. Situations and characters unfortunately just didn't grab my atention

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