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Jessica McEntee

Jessica McEntee

Jessica Noyes McEntee teaches fiction at Westport Writers’ Workshop in Connecticut and works in marketing at Pequot Library. She was appointed as Westport's Poet Laureate in July 2022. Her debut poetry chapbook was published by Finishing Line Press in June of 2019. Previously, she worked in the editorial department at Wiley. She graduated from Amherst College.

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Jessica McEntee

Fiction

Award-Winning Poet Ocean Vuong’s Debut Novel

On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press) is a hallucinogenic and free-wheeling meditation on addiction, violence and love, composed as a series of letters to an illiterate immigrant mother. Written by award-winning poet Ocean Vuong, this is ultimately a book about language and memory, the challenge of channeling and crystalizing…
Jessica McEntee
June 4, 2019
Fiction

Sisters’ Vanishing Act Conjures Fears in Post-Soviet Era

In Julia Phillips' affecting debut novel Disappearing Earth (Knopf), two sisters, ages eleven and eight, go missing one afternoon in a once-cloistered town at the northeastern edge of Russia. The effects of their disappearance play out for the following year among residents in this community, dredging up fears especially among…
Jessica McEntee
May 14, 2019
Fiction

At an Elite School, Be Careful Who You Trust

Set in the early 1980s, Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise (Henry Holt & Co.) is an artful and bold novel that elasticizes form and content. The plot centers on a love affair between Sarah and David, students at an elite school for the performing arts in an unnamed city. As in Donna…
Jessica McEntee
April 26, 2019
Fiction

Family Choices and Cultural Clashes Push Boundaries

Jennifer Acker’s debut The Limits of the World is a ruminative and insightful look at the way in which choices play out over several generations within a family's timeline. The subject matter calls to mind Pachinko, and the book will also draw inevitable comparisons to Jhumpa Lahiri. The Chandaria family, Indians who’ve settled in…
Jessica McEntee
April 16, 2019
Fiction

Animal Husbandry and Academic Rivalry

Paging fans of Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry: Lindsay Stern’s new novel, The Study of Animal Languages (Viking Books), is a thought-provoking and surefooted debut that balances questions of morality with an affecting emotional arc. Philosopher Ivan and animal linguistics expert Prue are married academics and (so-called) experts on communication whose relationship has flatlined, in…
Jessica McEntee
March 6, 2019