Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children and Dora: A Headcase. Her highly acclaimed memoir, The Chronology of Water, was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for Creative Non-fiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Awards’ Readers’ Choice. Her TED talk, ‘The Beauty of Being a Misfit’, has been watched over two million times. Lidia teaches in Oregon, where she lives with her husband and their son. She is a very good swimmer.
@LidiaYuknavitch | lidiayuknavitch.net
“Pity the small backs of children, he heard her saying. They carry death for us the second they are born.”
“We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.”
From the Waterstones vlog: Liv talks The Book of Joan. “It is fiercely feminist, fiercely intelligent - unabashedly so - it’s raw, it’s vital, it’s bubbling and bristling, full of energy and it is absolutely fantastic.”
“The planet, gripped by inequality and anthropocentricity, run by men who can only move ‘warward’ or ‘fuckward’, is headed for the end … The story of the Maid of Orléans transferred to the age of AI is a timely reminder that resistance, however futile or dangerous, is always preferable”
Anna Aslanyan
The Spectator
“Yuknavitch’s weirdly beautiful Joan is a reinvention of what being human is. We are not something against nature but something within nature, permeable and dependant on the world, no matter how we tell ourselves we can stand above our planet and exploit it.”
New Statesman
“Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan are reimagined in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, in this compellingly ambitious examination of gender, semiotics and warfare … The narrative mode is to show through dramatic, often moving scenes, and then to tell, reflecting on them analytically. This disjunction can be jarring, but it’s knowingly done, because the book’s style is itself a theme”
Lara Feigel
The Guardian
“Post-apocalyptic fiction too often pays lip service to serious problems like climate change while allowing the reader to walk away unscathed, cocooned in an ironic escapism and convinced that the impending disaster is remote. Not so with Lidia Yuknavitch’s brilliant and incendiary new novel, which speaks to the reader in raw, boldly honest terms. “The Book of Joan” has the same unflinching quality as earlier works by Josephine Saxton, Doris Lessing, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin and J. G. Ballard. Yet it’s also radically new, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum…”
Jeff Vandermeer
New York Times
