Now You Know It All

by Joanna Pearson

Overview

Poised on the precipice of mystery and longing, each character in Now You Know It All also hovers on the brink of discovery—and decision. Set in small-town North Carolina, or featuring eager Southerners venturing afar, these stories capture the crucial moment of irrevocable change. A young waitress accepts an offer from a beguiling stranger; a troubled boy attempts to unleash the villain from an internet hoax on his party guests; a smitten student finds more than she bargained for in her favorite teacher’s attic; two adult sisters reconvene to uncover a family secret hidden in plain sight. With a sharp eye for rendering inner life, Joanna Pearson has a knack for creating both compassion and a looming sense of threat. Her stories peel back the layers of the narratives we tell ourselves in an attempt to understand the world, revealing that the ghosts haunting us are often the very shadows that we cast.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822967118
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Series:	Drue Heinz Literature Prize Series
Pages:	214
Sales rank:	220,674
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Joanna Pearson is a lapsed poet who once wrote a young adult novel on a whim but nowadays mostly writes short fiction. Her first collection of stories, Every Human Love, was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Foreword Indies Awards, and the Janet Heidinger Prize for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net, as well as other journals. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. A native of western North Carolina, she now lives with her husband and two daughters near Chapel Hill, where she works as a psychiatrist.

Editorial Reviews

Subtle and moving . . . Pearson’s stories glide through their alarming moments with a precision hard to look away from. This will transfix and unsettle.”—Publishers Weekly
 

“Pearson’s writing is not only tightly plotted but often gorgeous in the most wonderfully ominous way, often combining the literary and the eerie within a single well-crafted sentence. . . . Now You Know It All knits together a dreamlike world in which the settings and characters are crafted in laser-cut realism, while the dark coincidences and subplots hint at the supernatural, the spooky, the rupturing of reality.” —The Rumpus
 


“Now You Know It All takes in a wide array of characters—a waitress, a student, adult sisters, a young child—with a keen, knowing eye.” —INDYWeek

“A worthy acolyte of Flannery O’Connor, Pearson trades in dark character studies punctuated by alarming events. They are set mostly in Southern suburbs and small towns, which are rendered with precise authenticity. And while Pearson never crosses the line into Southern gothic territory, she walks right up to it and flirts with it in a way that delights my deep-seated love of stories that examine the dark underbelly of human nature when it’s exposed to the light.” —Suzanne Van Atten, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 

“Joanna Pearson’s Now You Know It All offers a splendid array of stories that reminded me page after page of old-fashioned stories when writers built their pieces brick by brick and built them to last. Pearson is not after the quick two-page, soulless anecdote glancing. [With a] Southern flavor, Now You Know It All is about the souls and hearts of the characters and how so very much of living got them to a point where nothing can be the same again.” —Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World

“I love this book. Joanna Pearson’s skills as a storyteller seem limitless. She writes about men, women, and children with confidence and believability, with such humor, flair, and even horror, I feel like she’s the one who knows it all.” —Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish and The Kings and Queens of Roam

“Joanna Pearson’s blazingly insightful stories veer in and out of the uncanny to imagine women at turning points—a small-town college student on her first internship, a mother recovering from postpartum psychosis, a waitress fleeing Epstein-like abuse—to speak to the dangers and unease of our time. More powerfully, they uncover the perils always lurking in the ‘trick brain,’ as one character puts it, the part of the self drawn to life’s darkest places. A collection you won’t soon forget.” —Belle Boggs, author of The Gulf, Mattaponi Queen, and The Art of Waiting

From the Publisher

08/30/2021

Pearson’s subtle and moving collection (after Every Human Love) showcases women pushed to their limits, with undertones of creepiness or dread. Two adult sisters reminisce in “Boy in the Barn” about their summers spent with their grandmother and are struck with the memory of tying up a boy. In “The Whaler’s Wife,” a college student volunteers for summer tutoring in Cambridge, Mass., and lives with a wealthy family hiding an unspoken tragedy. In “The Lily, the Rose, the Rose,” Cora frets that her second pregnancy at age 40 might land her back in the hospital with postpartum depression; meanwhile her young son becomes friendly with a stranger. The eponymous protagonist of “Darling” (described as “incongruous,” like “a switchblade on a heap of pillows”) reels from the news that the billionaire who groomed and trafficked her has died in prison. Beth Ann, the child therapist narrator of “The Films of Roman Polanski,” becomes enthralled by a manipulative 13-year-old foster child she is treating. Naive eighth-grader Margaret is taken under the wing of her Latin teacher in “Amo, Amas, Amat” and is bewildered by the teacher’s wife, who treats dolls as real babies. Throughout, Pearson’s stories glide through their alarming moments with a precision hard to look away from. This will transfix and unsettle. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly