Transatlantic is delighted to announce that World English rights to Rowan Perez’s debut hybrid novel, BODY’S A BAD MONSTER, has been acquired by Danys Mares at Andrews McMeel!
Both a fictionalized diary and a poetic narrative, BODY’S A BAD MONSTER is a story of coming-of-age, love, and heartbreak that fluctuates between narrative and confession with two narrators inhabiting the same body – and while both are telling the truth; neither is.
BODY’S A BAD MONSTER follows three phases of the narrator’s life, as told through a dissociative state called “Mouse”; Mouse and the narrator take turns inhabiting the “body” to tell the story as it unravels over time. As Mouse moves in and out of love and pain, the novel uses erasure text to intentionally refuse to engage with male voices or with violence, while simultaneously unspooling the complicated knots of Catholicism, queerness, feminism, and body dysmorphia.
An experimental, tender, and darkly funny piece of hybrid fiction, BODY’S A BAD MONSTER explores the hard-won humor and joy that it takes to survive through mental illness, trauma, and, ultimately, recovery in the world today, and will appeal to fans of Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Carmen Maria Machado, and Mona Awad.
Rowan Perez is a queer Cuban-American and recent graduate of the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Rising Phoenix Review, Buzzfeed, and human magazine. Rowan workshopped parts of BODY’S A BAD MONSTER under Mona Awad and the initial opening to it was the recipient of the 2021 Harvey Swados Award for Fiction. She spends a great deal of time outdoors with her rescued racing greyhound named Goblin. You can find more of her writing on Tumblr and IG at @rid.inkskinned, where she has 260K and 7.9K followers, respectively.
Amanda Orozco at Transatlantic Agency handled the deal.
Congratulations Rowan!