Kristen Arnett is the author of The New York Times bestseller Mostly Dead Things: A Novel and Felt in the Jaw: Stories. A queer writer based in Florida, she has written for The New York Times, Guernica, BuzzFeed, McSweeney’s, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. In With Teeth (Riverhead Books), Arnett offers a surprising and moving story of two mothers, one difficult son, and the limitations of marriage, parenthood, and love. If she’s honest, protagonist Sammie Lucas is scared of her son. Samson is a sullen, unknowable boy who resists her every attempt to bond with him. She tries her domestic best – driving, cleaning, cooking, prodding him to finish projects for school – while growing increasingly resentful of Monika, her confident but absent wife. Now Sammie’s life begins to deteriorate into a mess of unruly behavior, and her struggle to create a picture-perfect queer family unravels. The New York Times found With Teeth “sublimely weird, fluently paced, brazenly funny and gayer still, and it richly deserves to find readers.”
