PORTHOLE

This is a preorder. Porthole will be released in June of this year, with copies mailing prior to release.

World-renowned art-house film director Helena Désir may (or may not!) be responsible for the on-set death of Corey, her latest muse, leading man of the moment, and frequent bedmate. Haunted by the accident, a long trail of ex-lovers, and the corporate film studio who desperately wants to keep her, their cash cow, at work, Helena unravels and is swiftly delivered to a luxury retreat known as Jaquith House, where fellow sufferers of psychic exhaustion—an agèd sound artist, an international entrepreneur, a tennis pro, a woodsman, twin Finnish massage therapists, and a sex-addicted chef—ferry her from meal, to rest activity, to spa experience, to canoe ride, and back to dinner again, with unmatched hilarity and wit. Told with a captivating quick clip of a gait, Porthole is a portrait of an auteur at the peak of her powers and in the midst of an extravagant, albeit well-dressed, meltdown. Hallucinatory and imagistic, filled to the brim with champagne toasts, boathouse romps, brothels, yoga pants, Parisian hotels, dressing room hookups, and red carpet faux pas, Porthole gifts us the world through the eye of the camera lens, as if through a sea of glass, and asks: If we’ve sinned in the service of art, can we be forgiven?

Praise for Porthole:

“Evoking the mighty pens of Katherine Anne Porter, Muriel Spark, Jean Echenoz, and Kazuo Ishiguro might begin to give a sense of this funny, strange, sad and terribly smart novel but truly—Porthole is very much its own marvelous animal—just a sense. Joanna Howard is a brilliant writer and Porthole is her best book yet.”
—Laird Hunt, National Book Award Finalist, author of Zorrie

“An obsessive yet capacious novel of intrigue and deceit, Porthole is a hilarious and exhilarating provocation about art-making at any cost and the gutting ruthlessness of power. Joanna Howard is a singular talent; her work is propulsive, kinetic, and laser sharp. She is a genius!”
—Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

“In this clever novel by Joanna Howard, sensation is everything, not only for its narrator Helena Désir, but the reader too, for reading Porthole is like entering cinema and experiencing the excesses of its world at the exact same time. A true pleasure.”
—Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night

“Crackling with wit and cinematic confession, Porthole is a wicked, propulsive journey through a glass darkly, deep into the tricky eye of the auteur. As Howard deftly conjures intimate encounters (and collisions) between lens, muse and director, she offers a black comedy of Muriel Spark–esque proportions and a brilliant and sharply observed meditation on art and its makers.”
—Mona Awad, author of Rogue

“Porthole disintegrates boundaries between personhood and performance, auteur and addict, in a beguiling novel about the outer limits of artistic indiscretion. Fellini’s 8 1/2 with a twist of Moshfeghian wickedness.”
—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

“Howard is what was once called a stylist—but one with a penchant for adventure. Porthole takes part in an intellectual culture that seems in America to have withered on the vine: philosophical cinema, lexicographical play, all the delights of the mind and the eye… May she live to a hundred, raising foxes all the while.”
—Jesse Ball, author of The Repeat Room

“Told in speculative, visionary prose, Porthole is a tragicomic psychological novel about the portentous confluence of art and life—witty and absurd!”
—Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Savage Tongues

“Like The Magic Mountain on acid! So much energy. Such a captivating cast of weirdos. I could’ve stayed at Jaquith House, lost in the mise-en-abyme of Helena’s mind, for years.”
—William Brewer, author of The Red Arrow