The X Book

Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards for Novel, The Believer Book Awards, 2019: Fiction Longlists, The Northern California ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2019, Fiction Longlist, and 2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist, The Book of X has been acclaimed as a Best Book of 2019 by Vulture, Entropy, Buzzfeed, Thrillist.

“Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything,” says Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist. Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties, describes it as “a gorgeous, grotesque, and heartbreaking novel that I loved every page of.”

A surreal exploration of one woman's life and death amidst a bizarre landscape of meat, office desks, and nefarious men, The Book of X follows the story of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted into a knot. From her childhood on the family meat farm with her parents, to a desk job in the city, and finally, to experiencing love, she struggles with her body, relationships with men, and societal expectations, all the while yearning for a softer reality than the one she finds herself in.

Blending the mundane drama of everyday life like schoolyard crushes and paying bills with the fantastical imagery of rivers made of thighs, men up for sale, and fields of throats, Cassie’s multiple realities intersect to create a mesmerizing, surreal world of haunting beauty.

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