Published in 2020
192 pages
Jessica Anthony’s short stories can be found in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, New American Writing and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her books have been published in a dozen countries and reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and The San Francisco Chronicle. She will be serving as one of four Bridge Guard artists in Sturovo, Slovakia in 2015.
What is this book about?
A young congressman discovers a mysterious stuffed aardvark on his doorstep and sets out on a rip-roaring journey to find out what it means.
It’s early one morning on a hot day in August, and millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R), planning his first reelection campaign and in deep denial about his sexuality, receives a mysterious, over-sized FedEx delivery on his front stoop. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark.
This outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between contemporary Washington, D.C., where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England–where we meet Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffed the aardvark, and Richard Ostlet, the naturalist who hunted her. Our present world, we begin to see, has been shaped in profound and disturbing ways by the secret that binds these men.
