Open Throat

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. One of the Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2023. One of The New York Times' 10 Best California Books of 2023. Longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

"Open Throat is what fiction should be." -The New York Times Book Review

A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity's foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience.

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call "ellay." As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

Henry Hoke's Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.

Autorentext

Henry Hoke is an editor at The Offing and a writer whose work has appeared in No Tokens, Triangle House Review, Electric Literature, *and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes*. He co-created the performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles and has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop. He lives in New York City.

Klappentext

"Open Throat is what fiction should be." -The New York Times Book Review

One of ELLE's Best Summer Books of 2023, and one of i-D's Fiction to be Excited for in 2023. Named a Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Buzzfeed, Boston Globe, Nylon, Alta, Shondaland, Chicago Review of Books, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Literary Hub

A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel.

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity's foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience.

When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call "ellay." As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?

Henry Hoke's Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.

Zusammenfassung

"[A] slim jewel of a novel . . . It is not in spite of its brevity - or its surrealism, or its nonhuman narrator - that Open Throat leaves you with such a lingering impression, but because of these elements . . . Though many readers will label Open Throat unconventional, this act of ravishing and outlandish imagination should be the norm, not the exception. At its best, fiction can make the familiar strange in order to bring readers and our world into scintillating focus. Open Throat is what fiction should be." -**Marie-Helene Bertino, The New York Times Book Review**

"Give this sinewy prose poem a chance and you'll fall under the spell of a forlorn voice trapped in the hellscape of modern America . . . it's the combination of attention and naiveté that charges his observations with unconscious profundity . . . Hoke coughs up little hairballs of comic misunderstanding throughout Open Throat, but it's the pathos that sustains his novel. The mountain lion speaks for a lonely, alienated generation. " -Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A propulsive, one-sitting read, if also a somber one . . .. Without spoiling the story, it's perhaps enough to say that the climax of Open Throat is a very L.A. one, with spotlights and drama. But it's also a universal one." -Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times

"A wide-ranging portrait of technology-fueled, lucre-gorged loneliness in an uncaring, self-congratulatory liberal city obsessed with fame and ignorant of its own ecological and social breakdown. The writing is so sinuous, so wry and muscular, yet with a padding, pawing playfulness, that you're ready to go anywhere Hoke wants to take you . . . This is a clever, witty conceit, cleverly, wittily executed. It's funny, it's heartbreaking and nail-bitingly propulsive, with an exquisite Hitchcockian climax." -Rahul Raina, The Guardian

"The premise alone makes Henry Hoke's startling achievement worth the purchase . . . Philosophical and heartfelt, Open Throat is the ultimate immersion into the mind of an unlikely protagonist." -Lauren Puckett-Pope, ELLE

"Stunning . . . [an] unflinching tale of gender identity, climate change, alienation and what it means to be a sentient being in today's world. It's a journey into strange new territory through the eyes of a hungry lion - yet also filled with unnerving familiarity." -Bernadette Fay, San Francisco Chronicle

"One of the most unique novels I've read in years . . . I didn't know I would feel such attachment to a mountain lion when I started reading, but in Henry Hoke's talented hands, they become an instantly memorable and endearing protagonist." -David Vogel, Buzzfeed

"This lyrical story of loneliness and kinship in Los Angeles is, by turns, delightful and melancholy-and inventive throughout." -Vanity Fair

"Strange, unique, and mesmerizing." -Gabino Iglesias, Boston Globe

"Succinctly dazzling . . . Through the prismatic POV of its grieving, raging and love-hungry lion, Open Throat claws at the productive and painful possibilities of interspecies relationships and ecological grief . . . Open Throat never yields to the pause of a full stop, its wildfire of feeling burning relentlessly until the story's end." -Alice Bucknell, frieze

"Hoke's syntax throughout is a marvel . . . Open Throat is a tight, funny book with an alarmingly unique tone, and with an ending that redeems itself from all the questions that pad along the way." -Meg Whiteford, The Brooklyn Rail

"Compulsively readable . . . Hoke's emotionally immersive construction of this lion mind is [persuasive]-and that is the book's great achievement. Even more so than with the character's wry, befuddled observations about us, I was caught up in the wild world of feeling and desire that Hoke has conjured." -Megan Milks, 4Columns

"Open Throat reads as if the narrator of Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation had become a mountain lion and moved to Griffith Pa…