Devouring, yearning, erasing, grabbing—these stories pulse with intensity and Novak’s scalpel-precise prose cuts to the core again and again. A startling and exciting collection that does not shirk from pretty much anything.
–Aimee Bender, author of Willful Creatures and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
“An incandescent debut by an incandescent talent. The stories in Meaningful Work are truly marvelous, radiant with wit, beauty, and hard-earned truths. Novak does soul-work in these pages – you will find yourself mesmerized, thrilled, renewed.”
I can’t remember the last time I had as much fun reading a new collection of stories as I did JoAnna Novak’s Meaningful Work. Every sentence is delectable—an appropriate word choice, given that Novak writes so gorgeously about food. (When you read these, make sure you have something good to eat at hand. They will make you hungry.) Acerbic, touching, graceful, and eccentric, Meaningful Work pays homage to Donald Barthelme and Grace Paley, even as it adds a fresh, unique, inimitable voice to our national literary conversation.
––David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place
In Meaningful Work, JoAnna Novak shows us what this world makes us swallow: shit jobs and Hostess Snowballs, the nuclear family, our own fulvous tongues. Language-glutted, her starveling girls and hollowed mothers gag on everything and nothing. Novak spreads it: a mangled smorgasboard of harms. This is a book of jagged mouthfuls, of candy-shell sentences with hot, gloppy cores. There’s no purging it. Read and the stories stay with you, like cuts rubbed with Sharpie in the fat of your heart.