Jess Arndt Books in Order

Jess Arndt writes fiction that stays close to the awkward facts of being human: bodies, desire, misread signals, and the odd ways people try to feel at home in themselves. Their debut story collection, Large Animals, moves between ordinary places and situations that suddenly tilt into something stranger.

Arndt has said that animal stories were part of their childhood reading, including The Velveteen Rabbit, Jack London adventures, and Julie of the Wolves. Those books helped shape a lasting interest in the blurry line between human and animal life. As a teenager, they were also looking hard for queer stories that might reflect feelings they could not easily name.

Writing started as a private necessity. Arndt has described their early work as teenage, gay, and written in the effort to survive, a blunt account of why language and imagined lives mattered. That urgency still sits under their work, even when a story takes a funny or surreal turn.

They earned an MFA from Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and built a life around both writing and teaching. Earlier on, Arndt taught fiction at Rutgers University, sometimes bartended, and published work in journals and art publications. They also received a Fiction Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010 and a Graywolf SLS Fellowship in 2013.

In 2010, Arndt helped found New Herring Press with Sara Jaffe, Jason Daniel Schwartz, and Sara Marcus. The small press makes room for prose that may be fiction, nonfiction, or a mix of both, and its handmade, collaborative approach fits Arndt's interest in work that does not sit neatly in one category.

Large Animals took time to finish. Arndt began the book while living in New York, during a period of teaching, bartending, and personal change. Later, a move to the Mojave Desert, followed by Los Angeles, gave them room to complete it. The collection carries traces of those places, from dense city encounters to open desert space, without treating setting as mere scenery.

The body is never just background in these stories.

Published in 2017, Large Animals brings together twelve stories about people pushed up against the limits of identity, intimacy, and language. Its characters may deal with relationships, illness, gendered expectations, hunger, weeds, animals, or imagined transformations. The situations can be absurd, but the feelings underneath are direct: loneliness, desire, embarrassment, fear, and the wish to be seen without being pinned down.

The book was shortlisted for the California Book Prize. Arndt's work has also appeared in outlets including Granta, and they have made performance collaborations with the Swedish music group The Knife. Across these projects, they keep returning to form, voice, and the unsettled business of living in a body.

Arndt now lives on an island in Washington State and teaches at the University of Idaho and Pacific Northwest College of the Arts. Their career has moved through classrooms, small presses, performances, and short fiction, with curiosity at the center.