New Book by Faculty Member Joe Meno
Over the course of the last decade I’ve really thought
about “What can you do in a book that you can’t do in these other
narrative forms? What can you do that you can’t do in television or
film, or even a play or video games? What is a book, a prose novel,
specifically built for?” […] A book can capture these small, finite,
everyday moments that are maybe not as epic as a film or a television
show, but closer to the way I think that poetry works. There was
something about the novel’s ability to investigate or explore intimacy
between characters that you wouldn’t be able to replicate elsewhere.
--Joe Meno, interviewed in Newcity.
Fiction Writing associate professor Joe Meno parties like it’s 1999 in
his new novel Office Girl, from Akashic Books. Set in the final year of
the twentieth century, the book follows Chicago twentysomethings Jack
and Odile on a vendetta against boredom. By day they work in an office
call center, hawking medical supplies over the phone. The rest of the
time, they stage commando art gestures ranging from simple graffiti to
dressing in bed-sheet ghost and riding the trains. It’s far from a
quirky boy-meets-girl story, as both have their share of emotional
baggage and damage, and the pair ends up on a path that takes them to
unexpected futures.
The book is Meno’s seventh book and his fifth novel. His writings have
been published in McSweeney’s, One Story, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly,
Other Voices, Gulf Coast, The New York Times and Chicago Magazine. He
was a contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts
and politics magazine.
