TESS GUNTY earned an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash, and elsewhere. She was raised in South Bend, Indiana, and lives in Los Angeles.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
FINALIST • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • A Best Book of the Year:
The New York Times, TIME, NPR, Oprah Daily, Literary Hub,
Kirkus • A People Top 10 Book of The Year • A Bookpage Top 10 Book
of the Year
“Mesmerizing . . . A novel of impressive scope and specificity . .
. One of the pleasures of the narrative is the way it luxuriates in
language, all the rhythms and repetitions and seashell whorls of
meaning to be extracted from the dull casings of everyday life. . .
. [Gunty] also has a way of pressing her thumb on the frailty and
absurdity of being a person in the world; all the soft, secret
needs and strange intimacies. The book’s best sentences — and there
are heaps to choose from — ping with that recognition, even in the
ordinary details.”—Leah Greenblatt, The New York Times Book
Review
“The most promising first novel I’ve read this year . . . A feeling
of genuine crisis . . . propels the narrative through its many
twists to the catharsis of its bizarre ending.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall
Street Journal
“Ambitious . . . Despite offering a dissection of contemporary
urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the
individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter
brilliance is central to the achievement.”—The New Yorker
“Transcendent . . . Compelling and startlingly beautiful . . .
Gunty weaves these stories together with skill and subtlety.”—Clea
Simon, The Boston Globe
“Riveting . . . The Rabbit Hutch balances the banal and the
ecstatic in a way that made me think of prime David Foster Wallace.
It’s a story of love, told without sentimentality; a story of
cruelty, told without gratuitousness. Gunty is a captivating
writer.”—Sarah Ditum, The Guardian
“Original and incisive . . . This is an important American novel, a
portrait of a dying city and, by extension, a dying system. Its
propulsive power is not only in its insight and wit, but in the
story of this ethereal girl. . . . She is so vibrantly alive and
awake that when I finished this book, I wanted to feel that. I
wanted to walk outside. I wanted what is real. I wanted to wake up.
Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is breathtaking, compassionate and
spectacular.”—Una Mannion, The Irish Times
“A powerful and brutal book, brimming with dark and funny lines . .
. Gunty’s true subject, though, is a land of loneliness, squandered
potential and exploitation that feels uniquely American — and also
the human interconnections and strokes of luck that can help us
survive it.”—Dorany Pineda, Los Angeles Times
“This seriously impressive debut novel — about the inhabitants of a
low-rent apartment block in small-town Indiana — thrillingly blends
the vivid realism and comic experimentalism so beloved of American
fiction. The writing is incandescent, the range of styles and
voices remarkable. . . . There’s so much dazzling stuff here, it
can be hard to know where to look. . . . What lingers is something
simple: the sparkling interiority of its characters.”—Robert
Collins, The Sunday Times (London)
“Just when everything seemed designed for a brief moment of utility
before its planned obsolescence, here comes The Rabbit Hutch, a
profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art whose
seemingly infinite offerings will remain with you long after you
finish it. Each page of this novel contains a novel, a
world.”—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is
Illuminated
“The Rabbit Hutch aches, bleeds, and even scars but it also
forgives with laughter, with insight, and finally, through an act
of generational independence that remains this novel’s greatest
accomplishment, with an act of rescue, rescue of narrative, rescue
from ritual, rescue of heart, the rescue of tomorrow.”—Mark Z.
Danielewski, author of House of Leaves
“Philosophical, and earthy, and tender and also simply very fun to
read—Tess Gunty is a distinctive talent, with a generous and gently
brilliant mind.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your
Mother Is a Witch
“An astonishing portrait . . . Gunty delves into the stories of
Blandine’s neighbors, brilliantly and achingly charting the range
of their experiences. . . . It all ties together, achieving this
first novelist’s maximalist ambitions and making powerful use of
language along the way. Readers will be breathless.”—Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
“Darkly funny, surprising, and mesmerizing . . . A stunning and
original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining . . . Gunty
pans swiftly from room to room, perspective to perspective, molding
a story that . . . is extremely suspenseful and culminates in a
finale that will leave readers breathless. With sharp prose and
startling imagery, the novel touches on subjects from environmental
trauma to rampant consumerism to sexual power dynamics to mysticism
to mental illness, all with an astonishing wisdom and
imaginativeness. . . . A striking and wise depiction of what
it means to be awake and alive in a dying building, city, nation,
and world.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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