Johanna Stoberock Books in Order

Johanna Stoberock is a novelist, essayist, and teacher whose work moves between intimate personal choices and larger questions about the world people build together. She is the author of the novels City of Ghosts and Pigs, two very different books linked by their interest in isolation, responsibility, and the pressure of living with consequences.

Her route into fiction included time on both sides of publishing. Stoberock earned a degree from Wesleyan University and later completed an MFA in fiction at the University of Washington. Before settling in eastern Washington, she worked in New York book and magazine publishing, including editorial and research roles. That experience put her close to the machinery of books before her own novels reached readers.

Then she made room for her own work.

Her first novel, City of Ghosts, was published in 2003. It follows Isabel Grady, a New Yorker who marries her best friend's lover and moves with him to Nepal. The premise has the pull of a relationship drama, but the book is also about dislocation: Isabel is far from home, trying to understand her marriage, her friendship, and the unfamiliar city around her.

Stoberock returned to the novel form with Pigs in 2019. This time, the setting is a strange island where four children sort the world's trash and feed it to a herd of hungry pigs. When new people arrive, the fragile rules that have held the island together begin to shift. Readers who like unsettling fables and environmental questions will find a very different kind of story here.

The change in setting between the two novels is striking. City of Ghosts stays close to an adult woman's uneasy emotional life in Kathmandu, while Pigs uses a pared-down, almost dreamlike world to look at waste, group behavior, innocence, and greed. In both, Stoberock is interested in what happens when people cannot simply walk away from the choices they have made.

Place matters in her work.

Her essays have often drawn on the landscape of eastern Washington, while her fiction lets reality bend into more unfamiliar shapes. Alongside her books, her short stories and essays have appeared in literary and cultural publications. She has also received support through a Jack Straw Fellowship, an Artist Trust grant, the Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, and writing residencies.

Stoberock has taught writing and composition at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She lives in Walla Walla with her husband and two children. That balance of teaching, family life, and writing gives her career a practical shape, even when the worlds in her fiction become strange, remote, or hard to escape.

For readers, her small bibliography offers two clear entry points. Start with City of Ghosts for a tense, relationship-centered novel set in Nepal. Pick up Pigs for a darker, more allegorical story about children, garbage, and the moral costs of looking away.