Enter the Aardvark - Hardcover

Jessica Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, Anthony was working as "Bridge Guard," guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Sturovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine.

"It's a long time since I have enjoyed a novel so much. Fresh, witty and smart, it also has a heart. What more could you want? And who would have thought that you could become emotionally attached to a stuffed aardvark?"―KATE ATKINSON, author of Big Sky and Life After Life

"If you've been wondering, as I have, where the spirit of Nathanael West might be in these berserk and awful times, enter Jessica Anthony. With her highly inventive, ever attentive, and morally serious (as all great comedy must be) Enter the Aardvark, she estranges all over again our deplorable political moment, and thereby helps make it bearable."―JOSHUA FERRIS, author of The Dinner Party and Then We Came to the End

"Enter the Aardvark is one wild ride: a condemnation, a haunting, a song of love, a madcap political thriller-and it is absolutely unputdownable. I have long been a massive fan of Jessica Anthony's writing and this novel cements her as one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page. Welcome, readers, to her world."―LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author of The Third Hotel

"I've been waiting a long time for a book like Jessica Anthony's Enter the Aardvark, a book that not only manages to bridge supposedly unbridgeable divides in politics, in time, in geography, in love and sex, but also manages to do so by way of a time-traveling taxidermied aardvark. If that sounds unlikely, well, yes, exactly, that's why I've been waiting for so long for it-this unlikely, hilarious, moving, ingenious book. Enter the Aardvark is an absolute original, and so is Jessica Anthony."―BROCK CLARKE, author of Who are You, Calvin Bledsoe? and An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

"Jessica Anthony is a writer possessed of mind-bending talents."―HEIDI JULAVITS, author of The Folded Clock

"The feat of a virtuoso stylist who makes the wildly impossible seem everyday. Anthony stabs with tenderness, drags us through the purifying muck of love, and writes a refrain that does not repeat. A novel of riotous longing echoing across our continents and eras."―SALVADOR PLASCENCIA, author of People of Paper

"Jessica Anthony's Enter the Aardvark is a truly fresh piece of art. It is rare that a novel addresses the current political moment. With humor, intelligence and a keen eye for detail Anthony paints a frightening picture of this America. And above all else, this novel never lowers itself to preaching to the choir. This is a great satire."―PERCIVAL EVERETT, author of So Much Blue and Erasure