The Convalescent:
A Novel by
Jessica Anthony.
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To buy
The Convalescent,
click here.
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For an excerpt from the book, click here.
To hear a clip of Jessica Anthony reading from the novel, click here.
To read an interview with Jessica on The Rumpus, please click here.
For Bookslut's interview with Jessica, go here.
Please direct all press inquries topress@mcsweeneys.net.
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THE BOOK.
The Convalescent is the story of a small, bearded man selling meat out of a bus parked next to a stream in suburban Virginia . . . and also, somehow, the story of 10,000 years of Hungarian history. Jessica Anthony, the inaugural winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, makes an unforgettable debut with an unforgettable hero: Rovar Ákos Pfliegman − unlikely bandit, unloved lover, and historian of the unimportant.
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THE AUTHOR.
Jessica Anthony was born in Upstate New York, in a small agricultural community sandwiched between a Native American reservation and a cutlery factory. This has shaped her worldview. Since, she has traveled to over twenty countries, lived twice in Eastern Europe, and worked as a meat-cutter, an obituary writer, a singing telegram gal, and a college professor. Her first novel, The Convalescent, was published by McSweeney's Books in June 2009, and will be translated into Italian by Rizzoli/USA. The story concerns the life of a small and sickly Hungarian, Rovar Ákos Pfliegman, who sells meat out of a school bus in northern Virginia. The Convalescent has received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, and is a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" pick for Fall 2009. Her fiction has also appeared in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney's, Mid-American Review, New American Writing and elsewhere. She is the winner of the "Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award," the Summer Literary Seminars fiction contest to St. Petersburg, Russia, and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Ucross Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She resides in Portland, Maine.
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PRAISE.
"The novelist dances between then and now, painting history's and Rovar's unusual tragedies with traces of sympathy, shock and sadness, but mostly humor and resignation"
—San Francisco Chronicle
"By the time you come to leave Anthony's curiously warped world of grumpy mute dwarves, medieval giants and packaged meat, you'll find yourself wishing that real life was actually this vibrant and colorful. And when you find yourself being envious of a Hungarian dwarf with a rare skin condition, you know that the author has pulled off a very remarkable feat indeed.
—Spike Magazine
"Anthony's compulsively readable debut novel stars Rovar Pfliegman, who sells meat out of a bus in Virginia. Rovar is a peculiar, troll-like man: he is short and hairy, has not spoken since childhood, keeps a pet beetle and lives in the same broken-down bus that houses his meat business. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Rovar is his precarious singularity. He is the last of the Pfliegmans and, by his own account, he is falling apart. Although he halfheartedly seeks treatment for his various ailments, he seems far more bent on fulfilling the destiny of self-destruction all Pfliegmans (according to Rovar) are subject to. Rovar's explanation of his family sprawls deep into the past, probing beyond his chaotic childhood all the way back to the origins of the Pfliegman clan in premedieval Hungary. Along the way, the narrative nods to all sorts of greats − Kafka, Rushdie, Darwin and Grass, to name a few. But Anthony's style − funny, immediate and unapologetically cerebral − carves out a space all its own."
− PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
"Jessica Anthony is a writer possessed of mind-bending talents. Inconceivably, she's written a novel that's innocent and wise, grave and hilarious, bleak and hopeful, fast-paced and meditative, heartbreaking and heart healthy, evanescent and concrete. Reading it, I felt as though I'd stumbled upon a magical text that might, at any moment, disappear from my hands. The Convalescent is that kind of special."
− Heidi Julavits
"Jessica Anthony has given a voice − wry, sad, and arresting − to the wounded little homunculus that lives, largely ignored, in all of us, a creature that wrestles with a guilt and grief that is as historical as it is personal. The Convalescent is a melancholy delight."
− Chris Adrian
"The Convalescent is a fleshy fable spinning in and out of its own enormous, fabulous history. It is lush, cranky, and powered by dark, sweet humor. Mesmerizing. And a lot of fun. I enjoyed it completely."
− Katherine Dunn
"A blissfully nutty, brainy, ribald, brilliantly imaginative ode to human loneliness, oddity, and persistence."
− Francisco Goldman (The Long Night of White Chickens, The Divine Husband)
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