Joanna Scott
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Information about the author.
Works
- 4 works
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Tourmaline: A Novel
Joanna Scott
In the mid-1950s, Murray Murdoch transports his wife and four young sons to Elba, an island off the northwest coast of Italy, in a desperate attempt to escape the embarrassment of his financial failures in America. Seduced by the wealth promised in the island’s surfeit of semi-precious tourmaline, Murray struggles to establish a homestead and a fortune. But the allure of one of Elba’s other treasures—a bewitching local girl named Adriana Nardi—puts his quest into a tailspin. When Adriana mysteriously disappears one night, Elbans start having violent dreams in…
Joanna Scott
The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the “Henry Ford of Natural History,” by 1917 Craxton has become America’s preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world—filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles—wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton’s newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.
Various Antidotes: Stories
Joanna Scott
In her first collection of short stories, Various Antidotes, Scott culls from the annals of science and medicine real and imaginary figures whose peculiar obsessions she transmutes with effortless alchemy into the stuff of art. In one story she writes of van Leeuwenhoek, the mad lens-grinder of Delft, whose early microscope designs allowed him to see life in a drop of water and for whom “there was hardly a difference between discovering life and creating it.” In another she offers an account of the origin of the verb burke, after William Burke, who was…
Joanna Scott
In Joanna Scott’s breakthrough novel the Austrian artist Egon Schiele comes to prismatic life in a narrative that defies convention, history, and identity. A self-professed genius and student of August Klimt, Scott’s Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth-century Europe. Thrown in jail on charges of immorality, Schiele’s Mephistophelean reputation only grows in stature until at the age of twenty-eight, the artist dies in the Great Flu Pandemic. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints and times, this stunning novel won Scott a…
