LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the author of the national bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards’ Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Readers’ Choice Award; the novel Dora: A Headcase; and three books of short stories. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Awards’
Readers’ Choice Award. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregon, where she also teaches women’s
studies, film studies, writing, and literature. She received her doctorate in literature from the University of Oregon. A
book based on her recent TED Talk, The Misfit’s Manifesto, is forthcoming. She lives in Oregon with her husband, Andy Mingo, and their Renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good
swimmer.
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Advance Praise for The Book of Joan
“Riveting, ravishing, and crazy deep, The Book of Joan is as ferociously intelligent as it is heart-wrenchingly humane, as generous as it is relentless, as irresistible as it is important. In other words, it’s classic Lidia Yuknavitch: genius.”
—Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild
“Lidia Yuknavitch is a writer who, with each ever more triumphant book, creates a new language with which she writes the audacious stories only she can tell. The Book of Joan is a raucous celebration, a searing condemnation, and fiercely imaginative retelling of Joan of Arc’s transcendent life.”
—Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and New York Times bestseller Bad Feminist
“Dazzling. A post-apocalyptic literary tour de force, The Book of Joan begs for buzz. There is so much here that is transgressive and badass and nervy and transformational. Here is a Katniss Everdeen for grown-ups.”
—Chelsea Cain, New York Times bestselling author of Let Me Go, Kill You Twice, and The Night Season “It’s unfair to compare Yuknavitch to only female authors. With her verve and bold imagination, she’s earned the throne left empty since the death of David Foster Wallace.”
—Chuck Palahniuk, New York Times bestselling author of Doomed, Damned, and Fight Club “Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan inscribes whatever blank canvases it finds—space, skin, alabaster hallways, holding cells called Liberty Rooms—to tell the story of the vital and violent Joan. As with Dora, the price for entry into Yuknavitch’s world is corporeal. Her narrators demand we shed all fear of the body and step into a new literary nakedness. The Book of Joan is graffiti in white ink. It is where experimentalism meets the dirty earth and gets saved.”
—Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen, winner of the 2012 PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize
“Lidia Yuknavitch’s new book has left me throttled and close to speechless. Speculative doesn’t begin to describe this sexy, imaginative, and thoroughly original work. Atwood, Le Guin, and Lessing come to mind, but Yuknavitch’s sensibility, which includes her casual ability to completely blow your mind, is all her own.”
—Karen Karbo, New York Times bestselling author of Julia Child Rules and How Georgia Became O’Keeffe “Reading The Book of Joan is a meditation on art and sex and war. My brain is full-bloomed. Get ready: it’s glorious.”
—Amber Tamblyn, author of Dark Sparkler