Fiction
Portland, ME
May 2013, 4 weeks
Jessica Anthony is a novelist who spent her Anderson Center residency working on the first draft of a novella entitled Enter the Ardvark. Her novellas are tragi-comedies reliant upon the truth of the mundane in order to convey the truth of absurdity. Each novella examines the ways an unexpected event transforms the psychology of a single character. In Enter the Aardvark, a Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate has a fleeting affair with a young man who dies shortly thereafter, leaving him in his will the charge of a gigantic taxidermic aardvark.
She also spent her residency editing Telemaque Gauche, and in writing a first draft of The Difficult Son of Tching Dok Chow.
The Aardvark was published in March 2020, and noted as an “ingenious political satire” by The Guardian, a finalist for the New England Book Award for Fiction, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and was featured in Time Magazine. She is the recipient of McSweeney’s inaugural “Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award” and the Creative Capital Award for Literature.