Joanna Howard Overview

Joanna Howard's prose is funny and fun and pithy and smart; it’s also difficult to quite make heads or tails of it. Her prose escapes easy grasp and demands the reader’s participation in a manner rare among contemporary writers: it does... [more]

Joanna Howard's prose is funny and fun and pithy and smart; it’s also difficult to quite make heads or tails of it. Her prose escapes easy grasp and demands the reader’s participation in a manner rare among contemporary writers: it does not leave distinct holes to be filled in, or inclusively invite limitless interpretation; rather, it seems to strive for a cohesion and articulation that just cannot come entirely across, but it has definite, if distant, boundaries within the distinct logic that undergirds its characters' and situations' existences. It is like listening to a friend after an insuperable many years’ separation, or catching a cross-table conversation in a comprehensible dialect that you cannot yourself speak: like Norwegian to Swedes. Her stories often play with and manipulate familiar genres and their conventions, but the ethereal glow and levity of her words mark them as quite distinct – indeed, as alien to – sheer satire or postmodern posturing; there is an ethereality to her work even as it deals with the most tactile of subjects and carols with the campiest of genres. Her stories are often at once quietly visceral and bombastically literal; it is the kind of writing that invites seemingly contradictory "at once" qualifications, evidence perhaps of an ill-adept critic's attempt to define this utterly unique writer. [show less]