{"title":"Joanna Novak","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"contradiction-days-book-joanna-novak-9781646220762","title":"Contradiction Days","description":"Five months pregnant and struggling with a creative block, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the enigmatic Abstract Expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is drawn to the contradictions in Martin's life as well as art - the soft and exacting brushstrokes she employs for grid-like compositions that are both rigid and dreamy. But what most calls to JoAnna is Martin's dedication to her art in the face of paranoid schizophrenia. Uneasy with the changes her pregnant body is undergoing, JoAnna relapses into damaging old habits and thought patterns. When she confides in her doctor that she's struggling with depression and suicidal ideation, he tells her she must stop being so selfish, given she has a baby on the way, and start taking antidepressants. Appalled by his patronising tone and disregard of her mental health history, JoAnna instead makes a deal with herself: she'll surrender to her obsession with Agnes Martin and adopt the painter's doctrine of joyful solitude and isolation; if she fails, she'll comply and go on antidepressants. JoAnna rents a house in Taos and gives herself three weeks to dedicate herself to Martin's work and model her hermetic existence: phone off, email off, no talking to her husband, no touching the dog. Out of a deep, solitary engagement with a remarkable artist's body of work emerges an entirely new way for her to relate to the contradictions of her own body and face up to the joys and challenges of impending motherhood.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50095297134865,"sku":"CIN1646220765VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51417761153297,"sku":"CIN1646220765G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53222259425553,"sku":"GOR014813388","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1646220765.jpg?v=1751376118"},{"product_id":"i-must-have-you-book-joanna-novak-9781510719415","title":"I Must Have You","description":"The year is 1999, and thirteen-year-old Elliot is a self-appointed \"diet coach\" who teaches her classmates how to survive on one stick of gum a day to get heroin-chic, Kate Moss thin. Elliot is obsessed with her best friend and former \"client\" Lisa, who is fresh out of inpatient treatment and dating a nineteen-year-old drug dealer. Meanwhile, Elliot's mother Anna, a capricious poetry professor, has a drug addiction and eating disorder of her own. When Lisa transfers her fixation from food to sex with her boyfriend, Elliot's fragile grip on reality begins to falter, at the same that time that Anna's fascination with the object of her own blind lust, the student who relinquishes his cocaine to her during office hours begins to consume her. I Must Have You is the story of what happens one three-day weekend in an explosion of desire, hunger, and lost innocence.  JoAnna Novak's kaleidoscope of 1990s America, filled with vibrant imagery from riot grrl graffiti to Michael Jordan posters, offers a vision of the complexities of womanhood and the culture that keeps the modern girl sick. I Must Have You is a provocative debut of rare honesty from a daring new voice. Similar to the works of Miranda July, Novak's novel will appeal to a new generation of readers who hunger for raw female protagonists.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50378313761041,"sku":"CIN1510719415G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50378316480785,"sku":"CIN1510719415VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53508039311633,"sku":"GOR010067362","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1510719415.jpg?v=1751149141"},{"product_id":"meaningful-work-book-joanna-novak-9781573661911","title":"Meaningful Work","description":"Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize.  A stunning look at the labor of obsession and the industry of self-destruction.  In her lush, lyrical, and unflinching short fiction debut, JoAnna Novak examines the restless throb of desire amid the rote work of jobs and obligations, from the walk-ins of a New York banquet kitchen to the pier of Venice Beach. Fueled by jellyfish pad Thai and Necco wafers, Mountain Dew and Xiaolongbao, the characters in these stories defy boundaries and mores: In “MEMO 19,” a former anorectic, bored of recovery and her clerical job, invites an unparalleled act of sexual defilement and in “Rio Grande, Wisconsin,” a fleshly preteen fantasizes about Bill Murray on a family vacation to Wisconsin. Celebrating the grueling beauty of the shift and the ticking virtues of self-restraint, Meaningful Work is a pageant of formal experimentation, in fearless, glittering prose.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50390942384401,"sku":"CIN1573661910G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1573661910.jpg?v=1761990566"},{"product_id":"domestirexia-book-joanna-novak-9781593767631","title":"Domestirexia","description":"Domestirexia goes beyond the entanglement of 'domestic' and 'anorexia' exploring a behind-closed-doors sensuality, borne in the concept of making home. Home can be a space of both resistance and discomfort that one desires or takes pleasure in enjoying. Rote notions of home and the domestic are reimagined in these poems as estranging, excessive, and populated by unknowable characters. Exploring themes of family, sacrifice, disease, death, money, cooking, romance, sex, art, and the visceral qualities of the everyday, the poems twist themselves into binds for the reader to undo or surrender to. Quarantined at her in-law's house during Covid, Novak wrote these poems while watching The Great British Baking Show, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, skimming Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and babysitting an infant. These are poems about wanting to misbehave. Light voyeurism at home, with gin and cake.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50485335425297,"sku":"NGR9781593767631","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51037757374737,"sku":"NIN9781593767631","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51331542876433,"sku":"CIN1593767633G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1593767633.jpg?v=1750762295"},{"product_id":"new-life-book-joanna-novak-9781625570277","title":"New Life","description":"\u003cp\u003eA subversive glimpse into the dark wildness of preparing for motherhood. NEW LIFE is a meditation on the changing\/changeling body, wrought in lyric decadence. Novak leads a seductive tour through plashy islands, Great Lakes hideouts, cursed apartments, and castaway nightmares, sighting the baroque and the barren, and celebrating the romance of isolation amidst an interior of plenty.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePoetry.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51040131219729,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51040134168849,"sku":"NIN9781625570277","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52472751358225,"sku":"NLS9781625570277","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1625570279.jpg?v=1750992343"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-joanna-novak.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}