With Teeth (Riverhead Books, 2021)

2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist

If she’s being honest, Sammie Lucas is scared of her son. Working from home in the close quarters of their Florida house, she lives with one wary eye peeled on Samson, a sullen, unknowable boy who resists her every attempt to bond with him. Uncertain in her own feelings about motherhood, she tries her best—driving, cleaning, cooking, prodding him to finish projects for school—while growing increasingly resentful of Monika, her confident but absent wife. As Samson grows from feral toddler to surly teenager, Sammie’s life begins to deteriorate into a mess of unruly behavior, and her struggle to create a picture-perfect queer family unravels. When her son’s hostility finally spills over into physical aggression, Sammie must confront her role in the mess—and the possibility that it will never be clean again.

Blending the warmth and wit of Arnett’s breakout hit, Mostly Dead Things, with a candid take on queer family dynamics, With Teeth is a thought-provoking portrait of the delicate fabric of family—and the many ways it can be torn apart.

PRAISE

“Arnett [is] adept at staging sensuous tragicomedies against the often-freakish backdrop of Florida. . . . Come for the wackiness and wonder of queer family dynamics, stay for the poignant portrait of motherhood on the brink.”
—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Arnett writes movingly . . . . [She] deftly examines the psychological dynamics of a family, raising complicated questions about whether mothers can ever truly understand how to raise sons and whether our children, too often, are mirrors of our own worst tendencies.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“With Teeth is a wonderfully sticky novel about motherhood, partnership, sex, and love. Kristen Arnett lets her characters have the run of the place, and it’s delicious fun to watch them do, say, and think things they’ll regret.”
—Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here

“A darkly funny, brutally honest story about a woman undone by motherhood. Kristen Arnett grapples with the big questions: Is any child essentially unlovable? What does a happy ending look like? With Teeth digs in deep and doesn’t let go. I truly loved it.”
—Jennifer Weiner, bestselling author of Mrs. Everything and That Summer

“From the very wise, very funny Kristen Arnett, With Teeth is as exhilaratingly candid as it is morally complex. Three cheers for this enthralling new book, which affirms my status as a card-carrying, rip-roaring, lifelong admirer of Arnett’s writing.”
—R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“With Teeth took me to a seedy Florida lesbian bar, handed me a flat beer with lipstick on the rim, and told me a story I couldn’t walk away from even if I tried. An exquisitely unsettling, brilliantly layered, darkly funny novel that’ll make you question your own perceptions.”
—Casey McQuiston, author of Red, White & Royal Blue

Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019)

New York Times Bestseller
2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist

One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles: her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals, her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function, and Brynn, Milo’s wife – and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with – walks out without a word.

Jessa struggles to salvage the failing taxidermy shop, seeking out less-than-legal ways of generating income, all the while clashing with her mother and brother. As their mother’s art escalates – picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose – Jessa must find a way to restore the Morton clan’s delicate balance, and that means first learning who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them all.

Kristen Arnett’s debut novel is a darkly funny, heart-wrenching, and eccentric look at loss and love and art and family, and a paean to her beloved Central Florida.

PRAISE

“MOSTLY DEAD THINGS packs messed-up families, scandalous love affairs, art, life, death and the great state of Florida into one delicious, darkly funny package. Kristen Arnett is wickedly talented and a wholly original voice.”
—Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins

“Kristen Arnett has written a portrait of an American family grieving their dead and their living, and lovingly tearing one another to shreds in the process. Too, this is a book about salvaging, about the Mortons’ refusal to abandon what remains, to be buoys and coconspirators for one another’s hearts. MOSTLY DEAD THINGS is a vicious and tender beast, alive with wry humor and the undeniable beauty of the ways we love.”
—Danielle Lazarin, author of Back Talk

“Mostly Dead Things is one of the strangest and funniest and most surprising first novels I've ever read. A love letter to Florida and to family, to half-lit swamps and the 7/11, and to the beasts that only pretend to hold their poses inside us. In Kristen Arnett's expert hands, taxidermy becomes a language to capture our species' impossible and contradictory desire to be held and to be free.”
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia

“If Heather Lewis and Joy Williams had a child it might be this—I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel like it. There’s a gunslinger cool to every sentence, like someone is telling you the last story they’ll ever tell you. Kristen Arnett is the queen of the Florida no one has ever told you about, and on every page she brings it to a steely and vivid life.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“The landscape of grief is paved with crazy as Kristen Arnett so beautifully shows us in her debut Mostly Dead Things. The Morton family has had more than their share of loss with the suicide of their father and the abandonment of Brynn, the girl loved by both Jessa and her brother, Milo. Throw in the Central Florida locale, a whole lot of taxidermy and a mother using sex toys as Art and that landscape takes crazy to a whole new level. Arnett shows a family learning to cope with what their new reality is with compassion, hope and humor. I look forward to hearing more from her.”
—Jennifer Dayton, Darrien Library

“The best kind of Florida vacation, the kind you spend with interesting people, a couple of drinks, and plenty of animals. Kristen Arnett’s debut novel is a generous, delightful and eccentric portrait of family life and questionable taxidermy.”
—Kelly Link, author of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction, Get in Trouble