Tess Gunty Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Tess Gunty is an American published author of fictional novels.

Tess was born in South Bend, Indiana, where she would grow up. When she was older, she was accepted into the University of Notre Dame. She would study English and graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English, as well as an Honors Concentration in Creative Writing.

Tess expanded her horizons while in college by going to Angers, France for her sophomore year. There she would study French as a language and a culture at l’Université Catholique de l’Ouest. She would then return to Notre Dame, where she took on tutoring roles for undergraduate as well as graduate students and faculty at the University’s Writing Center.

She also made a foray into play writing and the result was “Taxidermy”. The play would go on to win an ND Theater Now Award. She had the distinguishment of being nominated for four awards by the English department there. Radish Beds, a collection of her poetry, would win the Ernest Sandeen Award.

Gunty would graduate the college in 2015, but her writing endeavors did not stop there. She attended New York University, where she immediately got to work pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. She was also a Lillian Vernon Fellow. While there, she would teach creative writing to undergrad students. She also was one of the key coordinators in its Emerging Writers Reading series. Gunty would get a graduate research fellowship so that she could work on her novel in Paris, one of the most romantic and artistic cities on the planet.

While in grad school, Tess also served at Still Waters in a Storm as a mentor. This was a place where children in Brooklyn could go to read and write. She successfully graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing and would go on to work with another recognizable name. Jonathan Safran Foer had been a former professor, and the two were a team as she worked doing research and writing for a climate crisis nonfiction book that would come out in 2019 called We Are the Weather.

She has worked in many different capacities, from research assistant to editor and freelance writer. She also has helped to document the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns’ history and helped contribute a history of Westside, Atlanta to a Thadani Architects + Urbanists urban revitalization plan.

Tess also worked with the American museum of Natural History creating some customized science content for them and served as an editor on the book John Prine, One Song at a Time. This would be the debut book of Bruce Rits Gilbert and was written as a tribute to John Prine in tribute after the folk musician passed from coronavirus. She was also a fact-checker for a Public Broadcasting Service documentary series on America and its history of psychiatry called “Mysteries of Mental Illness”.

Tess Gunty’s first novel is called Rabbit Hutch. She would follow this up with her second novel, Honeydew. The rights to both of the books were obtained at auction by Oneworld, a U.K. based publishing house.

The author resides in Los Angeles, California.

Tess Gunty is the author of The Rabbit Hutch, a 2022 novel and her first. The novel has earned high praise from publications and authors alike. The Guardian called the literary work “inventive” and “acutely funny”. Mark Z. Danielewski described the novel as being a story that aches and bleeds and ‘even scars’ but also gives insight, laughter, and an act of rescue, bringing to mind the music of David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, and more.

Jonathan Safran Foer calls the novel ‘profoundly wise’ and ‘wildly inventive’, a work of art which has ‘seemingly infinite’ offerings that will go along and stay with the reader long after the book is finished, describing each page of book containing a world to itself. Meanwhile, Rivka Galchen also praises the novel, saying that The Rabbit Hutch is fun to read in addition to being ‘philosophical’ and ‘earthy’, praising Gunty as being a distinctive talent with a ‘gently’ brilliant mind.

The main character is called Blandine. She is a young woman who lives in a building. However, there is quite a bit that sets her apart from the residents that live in the building.

These include a writer who pens obituaries that are published online, a woman that is taking on all of the rodents on her own in an attempt to exterminate them, and a youthful mother that is harboring a secret that is too dark to share. All of them are neighbors in a low-cost housing complex where the walls are so thin you can nearly make out every conversation that is being had. All of this takes place in Vacca Vale, Indiana, which used to be the home to an industrial center that has now gone defunct.

This is the Rabbit Hutch. Blandine is intelligent and a beautiful young woman with her own apartment. However, she shares the space with three boys, all of them teenagers. She doesn’t understand them or even like them but can respect the fact that they are all on the hunt for meaning in their own lives. Just like her, they aged out of the foster care system run by the state and are now on their own.

The book takes place over one week in July that is very hot and goes until an act of violence threatens to change everything that they know. The Rabbit Hutch takes a look at contemporary America as well as its characters, managing to capture emotions like loneliness, feeling trapped, and freedom in one fell swoop.

Check out the novel that author Raven Leiliani describes as being written with a keen eye about intimacies that characters build around themselves and with other people. Be an admirer of her work the way that Rick Moody is, praising Gunty’s ‘uncommon originality’ in vision and voice. Pick up a copy of The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty and see what all the praise and hype is about!