Jessica Anthony is an American novelist based in Maine, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Bates College, her alma mater. She also studied at the University of Manchester and earned an MFA at George Mason University. Before writing full time she worked an odd run of jobs, including butcher in Sitka, Alaska.
Her fiction leans toward satire and structural play. The Convalescent (McSweeney's, 2009) won the press's first Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. Chopsticks (2012), made with the designer Rodrigo Corral, tells a piano prodigy's story through images and memorabilia, and it also came out as an app. Enter the Aardvark (2020) sets a closeted Republican congressman against a taxidermied aardvark that arrives in the mail. Her books keep returning to hypocrisy, concealment and the gap between what people perform and what they want.
The Most (Little, Brown, 2024) was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction and was named one of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 and one of the Washington Post's Best Books of 2024. In 2026 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow in fiction. She has also received a Creative Capital Award in Literature, and her novels have been published in around fifteen countries.
Start with The Most. It runs about 144 pages and is set on a single warm Sunday, November 3, 1957, in Newark, Delaware. Kathleen Beckett slips into the empty pool of her apartment complex and won't come out, while her husband Virgil tries to understand why. It reads in one sitting and shows her control of tone, time and withheld feeling. If you then want something louder, try Enter the Aardvark.
