The Book of X

*Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards for Novel *The Believer Book Awards, 2019: Editors’ Longlists in Fiction *The Northern California ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2019, Fiction longlist *2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist *A Best Book of 2019 –Vulture, Entropy, Buzzfeed, Thrillist

Etter brilliantly, viciously lays bare what it means to be a woman in the world, what it means to hurt, to need, to want, so much it consumes everything. –Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

I loved every page of this gorgeous, grotesque, heartbreaking novel. –Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

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.