HARD
MOUTH
(Counterpoint Press, August 2019) Find it at Indiebound, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Apple Books.
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