—Adrienne Westenfield, Esquire
“Holds up a fun-house mirror to our own political media in the age of spin…Reminiscent of Joyce’s Dubliners and the later works of T. S. Eliot, the prose quickly transitions into something more modern, but equally ambitious…The book raises some standard commentary about our relationship to politics and the media…but Anthony’s reflection of ourselves goes deeper. This is a world that serves, in some ways, as a salve to readers disgruntled by the last four years.”
—Eric Farwell, Los Angeles Review of Books
“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
“A blisteringly innovative and outrageous novel…If you’re searching for a sharp, looking-glass view into the far end of contemporary politics, look no further. Jessica Anthony’s novel has the pacing of a thriller with the satirical verve of Nathanael West. Beyond a fabulist send-up of our current political chaos, it’s an examination of the fall out of masculinity’s rigid constraints, played out through sexual repression and relentless power dynamics.”
—Lauren LeBlanc, The Observer
“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
“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 The People of Paper
“This book is batshit insane and I love it. What does a closeted gay Republican congressman who’s obsessed with Ronald Reagan have in common with a taxidermist in nineteenth-century England? Answer: an aardvark. And also much more, but I’ll let you discover the rest for yourself.”
—Elayna Trucker, Literary Hub
“Anthony has woven the historic and the contemporary into this brilliant and fast-paced novel. Bursts of hilarity and heartbreak make it a delight to read. A perfect escape for this political season.”
—Ginny Greene, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“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.”