If You Lived Here You'd Already be Home: Stories

by John Jodzio

Overview

“These stories were my kind of stories—a little weird and magical and bittersweet.” —Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

A middle-aged masochist in love with a comatose man. A gay birthday clown lamenting the loss of his beloved dog. An amateur veterinarian keeping watch over his suicidal daughter. And a bikini model with a barnacle stuck to her butt cheek. These are just a few of the characters who populate the quirky, offbeat world of If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home a world that feels at once alien and strangely familiar.

In these twenty-one brief, funny stories, John Jodzio documents his characters disappointment, frustration, and longing for a home that seems forever out of reach. By turns bleak and hopeful, cruel and tender, this is an exciting literary debut by a writer to watch, a writer with a unique and compelling voice.

“John Jodzio is the best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new.” —Chuck Klosterman, New York Times bestselling author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593766634
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/21/2017
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship and the author of the short story collections Get In If You Want To Live (Paper Darts Press) and If You Lived Here You'd Already Be Home (Replacement Press). His work has been featured in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney's, and One Story. He lives in Minneapolis.

Table of Contents

Colonel Cheese Is Closed On Mondays 7

Sleepy Mom 11

Sugarfoot 15

The Ear 21

Willem and Trudy, Deuce and Me 27

The Bog Body 31

Plight Path 37

Mail Game 53

Gravity 55

Make-a-wish 63

Monarchs 67

Everyone Prank Calls the Clown 77

Kalispell 83

Vessels 93

The Deadsitter 97

Inventory 107

The Barnacle 111

Homecoming 121

Protocol 131

Shoo, Shoo 139

The Egg 141

Whiskers 151

The Dojo 163

Alejandra 167

IfYou Lived Here You'd Already Be Home 175

The Girl with the Gambling Mother 191

Editorial Reviews

Praise for If You Lived Here You'd Already Be Home

"You may think you've read enough stories about penniless gay clowns who can't get over the loss of a dog, but I assure you, you have not. John Jodzio is the best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new." -- Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

"This is a collection where every single story had an ending that made me say, 'Goddamn.' These stories were my kind of stories-a little weird and magical and bittersweet." -- Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State

"John Jodzio has a spare, dark, funny style that manages to be sardonic without forfeiting sympathy. That's really effing hard." -- Dessa, Doomtree recording artist and author of Spiral Bound

"Jodzio's wonderful collection, If You Lived Here You'd Already Be Home, is a set of colorful and seemingly fractured tales, each shining brilliantly alone, but also growing more vibrant as one story lays over another. Together they form an intricately stained glass window that looks out onto a whole new world." -- Hanna Tinti, author of The Good Thief

"Jodzio presents 21 tales of woe, yet he never insults the reader by feeling sorry for his characters, nor do his characters ever feel especially sorry for themselves. They're all dealing in good faith with a world that's gone horribly awry, all playing the cards they've been dealt and making the best of their bad situations." -- Marc Schuster, Small Press Reviews

"Death, or the approach of it, abounds in If You Lived Here, yet the collection is far from morbid, and is, in fact, quite funny, as Jodzio's dark wit and pithy humor offer a pitch-perfect balance to scenes that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would verge on the sentimental, the cliché or the plain mean. Jodzio's reality is a cruel one, but he is not a writer who revels in this cruelty; rather he respects his characters, and manages to find beauty in even the most dire moments, to elicit empathy towards some of the most frigid beings imaginable." -- Adam Gallari, The Millions

"Each of the 21 stories begins with a pop and then unfolds in a taut, colloquial style filled with wit and pathos. The intensity rarely wanes as the characters struggle with loss and alienation and stumble toward happiness." -- Keith Meatto, New Pages

"...the comic conceit here always turns back toward something else, and all the harassed clowns, golf trap bog bodies, and barnacles attaching themselves to human asses are attempts, by Jodzio, to grasp something about the end of childhood, about the slow agony of growing up. From drunken, violent Make-a-Wish fishing trips to the simple pleasure of sucking nitrous from cans of Reddi Whip, the scenes of childhood, in Jodzio's world, convey both awkwardness and hope, pushed forward by a kind of blind courage and an inchoate fear." -- Spencer Dew, Decomp Magazine

Praise for Get in if You Want to Live

"Get in if You Want to Live is lovely and captivating. Every page looks great." -Fred Armisen, Saturday Night Live and Portlandia

"John Jodzio is one of those weirdos that is fun to spend time with - not in real life, of course, but on the page - because his stories are laugh-out-loud funny and have a strange, uncanny, and memorable edge to them. And even if you don't like to read, his book has cool pictures. It was totally worth the $200 I paid for it." -Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

"Get in if You Want to Live is full of genuine laughs for the LOL generation. It's fantastical whimsy meets potty mouth, gutter mind brilliance with some beautifully twisted artwork to accompany poignantly filthy stories." -Kat George, Thought Catalog

From the Publisher