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JoAnna Novak's short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently New Life, and a novel, I Must Have You. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and other publications.
JoAnna Novak uses obsession as her guide to write sharply and beautifully about different aspects of survival-if she gives herself the right rules in the right place, can she finally get it right? Contradiction Days is fierce in its ambition and vivid in its execution. -Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else What more could one want from a memoir? JoAnna Novak shies away from nothing in the portrayal of her struggle towards elusive self certainty and maternal commitment. I have not read a more honest account of the intellectual, physical, and psychological insecurities that both threaten and sustain us. A brave and thought-provoking book about the will to live and the will to create. -Kathleen Finneran, author of The Tender Land: A Family Love Story Anyone who's ever thought about-or lived at the intersection of-art, obsession, and embodiment will take solace in and inspiration from Contradiction Days. With Agnes Martin as both her source and temple, Novak charts the fear, euphoria, and madness of both art- and life-making. Contradiction Days is an exquisite ode to the inseparable pain and bliss of creation. -Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name Contradiction Days is that startling and rebellious work we see too rarely-a portrait of the female artist, pregnant with a baby and ambition, with rage and desire, who remains preoccupied by questions of philosophy, aesthetics, and abstraction, as her body grows. Novak's writing in these pages is as sublime, precise and arresting as the Agnes Martin paintings that transfix her. -Danzy Senna, author of New People
