Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Felt in the Jaw | 2017 | Kristen Arnett | Buy |
Felt in the Jaw (2017) is Kristen Arnett’s debut collection of short stories, published two years before her breakout novel Mostly Dead Things. The stories are set in central Florida and share the dark humor, queer perspective, and unflinching physicality that would come to define Arnett’s longer fiction.
The collection established Arnett’s voice and her thematic preoccupations: the strangeness of the body, the weight of family expectations, the difficulty of desire, and the particular atmosphere of Florida as a place where beauty and decay sit side by side. Readers who discovered Arnett through her novels will find the DNA of that work here in shorter, sharper form.