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    The Book of X
    The Book of X
    The Book of X
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Book of X

    Written by Sarah Rose Etter

    Narrated by Chloe Cannon

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A surreal exploration of one woman's life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men

    The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday -school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents-with the surreal-rivers of thighs, men for sale, and fields of throats-Cassie's realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 13, 2019
    ISBN9781515943846
    The Book of X
    Author

    Sarah Rose Etter

    Sarah Rose Etter is the author of the chapbook Tongue Party and The Book of X, winner of a Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her work has appeared in Time, Guernica, BOMB, the Bennington Review, The Cut, VICE, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan in Iceland. She earned her BA in English from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA in fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Los Angeles. For more info, visit SarahRoseEtter.com.

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    Reviews for The Book of X

    4/5

    55 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Loved how it was narrated and immersive the book was! Thank you for making an audiobook available to us all! :)

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Ah, another weird and wonderful indie press book that is just my sort of thing.  Cassie is born with a genetic condition that the women in her family have: their stomachs tied in a knot.  The boys are fine, of course.  It's interesting that a story like this has not been written before, with the unique yet almost obvious choice to make a character born a knot.  I don't like that the description of the book mostly focuses on "rape", as the book has so much more to it than that.  The book is mostly about body acceptance or body uncomfortableness.  How it is to live in a female body.  Also, a lot of body horror here in all sorts of ways, including a meat quarry and a Man Store.  The book is very surreal with a lot of haunting imagery.  It's Weird.  It's Wonderful.  I would set this on the shelf beside 'The Visitors' by Jessi Jezewska Stevens.  
    • 5/5
      The Book of X was my first time reading Sarah Rose Etter and what a thoroughly beautiful, darkly funny, joyus, heartbreaking, and absolutely weird novel! Two words: Meat quarry! A deeply affecting novel of womanhood and otherness and emotional trauma by way of simply being a person in the world. But the world that Sarah Rose Etter has built here is altogether alien and familiar. To attribute a quote from Paul Beatty about his 2015 satirical novel The Sellout; when asked about the novel he said something like 'its all true'. The Book of X for all its weirdness and absurdity and to this reader satire The Book of X could very well be a true story. Magical. Transcendent. Heartbreaking. Full of weird and bonkers elements that work within its own strange and beautiful internal logic. The Book of X is everything a novel should be. Everything a story should be.