AMANDA
GOLDBLATT
Buy Hard Mouth at your local bookstore, or at:
Bookshop, Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, or Apple iBooks.
HARD
MOUTH
(Counterpoint Press, August 2019) Find it at Indiebound, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Apple iBooks.
An adventure novel upended by grief and propelled by the aberrant charm of its narrator, Hard Mouth explores what it takes to both existentially and literally survive.
Praise for Hard Mouth:
Frank, funny, cool, and deceptively aloof, Hard Mouth gets to the heart of what it is to be a vulnerable thing living in this world. A beautiful book, and a totally pure reading experience.
Halle Butler, author of Jillian and The New Me.
Hard Mouth is a heartbreaker of a novel. A mind-bruiser, too. Amanda Goldblatt has written an astonishing, destabilizing, and beautifully human book. It’s wildly empathetic, strangely funny, and so sharp it cuts. I loved it.
Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature: Stories
Hard Mouth is an astonishing, moving, and transcendent grief-work with an absurd sense of humor. In this stunning debut, Amanda Goldblatt announces herself as a certified literary technician of detachment and despair.
Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Hard Mouth is a breathless and original debut from a strong writer. A funny, heartfelt, and beautifully written novel.
Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking
Hard Mouth's surprises chase each other down like dominoes, both in plot and language. Goldblatt masters the balance of the epic and the personal, the adventurous and the introspective. I clung to every page.
Jac Jemc, author of The Grip of It and False Bingo
Praise for Hard Mouth:
Frank, funny, cool, and deceptively aloof, Hard Mouth gets to the heart of what it is to be a vulnerable thing living in this world. A beautiful book, and a totally pure reading experience.
Halle Butler, author of Jillian and The New Me.
Hard Mouth is a heartbreaker of a novel. A mind-bruiser, too. Amanda Goldblatt has written an astonishing, destabilizing, and beautifully human book. It’s wildly empathetic, strangely funny, and so sharp it cuts. I loved it.
Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature: Stories
Hard Mouth is an astonishing, moving, and transcendent grief-work with an absurd sense of humor. In this stunning debut, Amanda Goldblatt announces herself as a certified literary technician of detachment and despair.
Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Hard Mouth is a breathless and original debut from a strong writer. A funny, heartfelt, and beautifully written novel.
Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking
Hard Mouth's surprises chase each other down like dominoes, both in plot and language. Goldblatt masters the balance of the epic and the personal, the adventurous and the introspective. I clung to every page.
Jac Jemc, author of The Grip of It and False Bingo
An astute, luminous examination of the complexities of love and grief, with never a careless word. Hard Mouth is a blazing feat of a book.
R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
In Hard Mouth, Amanda Goldblatt unsettles every old tale, disturbs every familiar sentence, shows us prose so new it’s almost jarring in its beauty, all while telling a story that’s impossible to put down. Her narrator Denny's maybe a revolutionary, maybe a feral runaway in a hollow tree, maybe just a sad, angry girl with a gun—but she's certainly the Bartleby of grief.
Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Lyrical, poetic, and playful, Hard Mouth is the story of a slow death and the inevitability of the questions, revelations, griefs, and strangenesses that come with it. Beautifully written, sorrowful, funny. A book to be savored.
Deb Olin Unferth, author of Wait Till You See Me Dance
For ten years, Denny’s father has battled cancer. The drawn-out loss has forged Denny into a dazed, antisocial young woman. On the clock, she works as a lab tech, readying fruit flies for experimentation. In her spare time, only her parents, an aggressively kind best friend, and her blowhard imaginary pal Gene—who she knows isn’t real—ornament her stale days in the DC suburbs.
Now her father’s cancer is back for a third time, and he’s rejecting treatment. Denny’s transgressive reaction is to flee. She begins to dismantle her life, constructing in its place the fantasy of perfect detachment. Unsure whether the impulse is monastic or suicidal, she rents a secluded cabin in the mountains. When she discovers life in the wilderness isn't the perfect detachment she was expecting—and that she isn't as alone as she'd hoped—Denny is forced to reckon with this failure while confronting a new life with its own set of pleasures and dangerous incursions.
Morbidly funny, subversive, and startling, Hard Mouth, the debut novel from 2018 NEA Creative Writing Fellow Amanda Goldblatt, unpacks what it means to live while others are dying.
Selected Interviews & Reviews
“Amanda Goldblatt’s new novel Hard Mouth explores solitude and grief,“ The Chicago Reader
“Humane, but Not Nice: The Millions Interviews Amanda Goldblatt,” The Millions
“Amanda Goldblatt Talks About 'Hard Mouth' And The Finality Of Death,” NYLON
“A Woman and Her Imaginary Friend Disappear into the Wilderness,” Electric Literature
“Empathy in the Usual Way: Elizabeth Ellen Interviews Amanda Goldblatt,” Hobart
“This Heroine’s Kind of a Female Millennial Thoreau,” The New York Times
“Amanda Goldblatt pens affecting cancer story...” The Chicago Tribune
BIO
Amanda Goldblatt's fiction and essays can be found at Guernica, Chicago Review, Fence, and elsewhere. She has been a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and has worked with writers as a contingent instructor at several institutions, most recently Northeastern Illinois University. Her debut novel, Hard Mouth, was published by Counterpoint.
Amanda lives in Chicago with her architect partner.
See a CV here.
Amanda lives in Chicago with her architect partner.
See a CV here.
SELECTED
WRITING
fiction unless noted
Protagonist, Annulet, Spring 2023
Dogs; A Dog, Harp & Altar, 22 March 2023 (essay)
Dirtbag, Chicago Review, Spring 2022
They Void, with Daniel Monroy Cuevas & Jordan Hicks, for Lit & Luz November 2021/March 2022 (video, text, objects)
The Idiots, Guernica, 26 February 2021
Neon; Regret: Lucio Fontana’s “Walking the Space,” Hobart, 2 December 2020 (essay)
I Take Cars Everywhere, Echoverse, 1 May 2020
The Final Defeat of My Colonialist Body, Notre Dame Review, Summer/Fall 2019
A Body on the Fritz, Catapult, 5 November 2019 (essay)
The Panel Believes, Bettering American Poetry, Vol. 3 (essay, a part of Catalina Ouyang’s “Conclusion & Findings”)
A Regular-Looking Man, Alone, Puerto del Sol, 17 May 2019
Night Fun, FENCE, Winter/Spring 2018
The Final Defeat of My Colonialist Body, DIAGRAM, 17.5
"Ha!” I Said Quietly, NOON, March 2017. Purchase here.
Huge Cheap Fake Meat, Hobart, 15 November 2016 (essay)
Softly, Whispery, Feathery, the Fanzine, 27 July 2016
Anhinga, Tammy, Issue 05 (essay)
The Era of Good Feelings, The Southern Review, Spring 2015
The Star Trek Essay, Hobart, 21 November 2014 (essay)
LDR/MTM: A Review of Female Friendship, Hobart, 31 July 2014 (essay)
Hang Ups, Hobart, 7 March, 2014 (essay)
Frasier at 31, Hobart, 21 April 2014 (essay)
Person-Character, Hobart, 20 May 2014 (essay)
TV, FENCE, Winter 2013-2014 (sold out/avail. digitally only)
Paris, The Rupture (fka The Collagist), August 2013
Bad Herald, matchbook: new & collected, Spring 2013
Crook, American Short Fiction, Fall/Winter 2011
Comprehensive, & CPR, NANO Fiction, Spring 2011
If Your Light Must Leave You, The Rupture (fka The Collagist), March 2010
Improvements, Vous, & Reliquaries for Louise Nevelson, Thermos, Issue 4 (poetry)
Susan Sontag, The Sonora Review, Issue 55/56
Her Beard, Redivider, 6:2
Girls Who Love Horses, DIAGRAM, 8.3 (Read a review from Short Story Reader here.)
★ A free PDF of Catalpa, my prose chapbook published by The Cupboard Pamphlet in 2010, is now available on Google Drive. After reading, please check out The Cupboard’s full catalogue of small, beautiful books.
INTERVIEWS
& REVIEWS
Laura Adamczyk Interviewed by Amanda Goldblatt, BOMB Magazine, 31 March 2023 To Imagine a Life Post-Climate Change: A Conversation with Diane Cook, LitHub, 11 September 2020 The first trans man to box in Madison Square spars with masculinity, The A.V. Club, 6 August 2018
EVENTS
Thursday, April 11, 9:30AM-12PM: Writing the Now - Literary Response to the Current Moment, Off Campus Writers’ Workshop, Winnetka. Register here (in-person & remote options).
Wednesday, April 17, 7PM: in conversation with Lily Meyer, in honor of her debut novel Short War (Deep Vellum), at Pilsen Community Books.
PAST
Saturday, February 18, 2-4PM: Open Reading @ Open Books Pilsen, with Joel Craig and Meghan Lamb, hosted by Michael Workman.
Wednesday, October 5, 6PM: in support of Anne K. Yoder’s The Enhancers (Meekling Press), at Cafe Mustache.
Tuesday, November 1, 6PM: in conversation with Deborah Shapiro, in honor of her new novel Consolation, at The Seminary Co-op.
Saturday, June 4, 2022, 7PM - reading in support of Kelly Krumrie’s Math Class, at Pilsen Community Books
Saturday, June 3, 6PM: reading in support of Parker Young’s Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane (Future Tense Books), with Natasha Mijares, Samson Monroe, Justin Rosier, and Nick Rossi, at The Whistler.
Friday, July 28, 7PM: in conversation with JoAnna Novak, in honor of her new memoir Contradiction Days (Catapult), at Women & Children First.
Friday, November 11, 7PM: in conversation with Jazmina Barerra, in honor of her novel Cross-Stitich (Two Lines Press), at Pilsen Community Books.