Emily Habeck Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Emily Habeck is a literary fiction author from Ardmore, Oklahoma who is best known as the author of the novel “Shark Heart.”

The author spent her childhood in Oklahoma and after graduating with a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree from the Meadows School of the Arts SMU then went to Peabody College and the Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Growing up in a small town in Oklahoma, the ocean always felt like something novel and wonderful to her. While she lived less than an hour from the coast for a lot of her adult years, she still feels captivated by the vastness and mysterious nature of the sea.
As such, she always felt that she needed to one day write about some creature from the ocean as a way of exploring an ecosystem that was so different yet so near to our own.

She published “Shark Heart” her debut work of fiction in 2023 and the novel has been described as an emotionally charged, tense, and tightly written work of fiction with a lot of comical moments.
Habeck has often said that much of her character’s life in the novel is a metaphor for her experience during one of the most trying times in her life.

Writing “Shark Heart” was how she came to reconcile some of the most pertinent questions she had about her life during that time.

Going deeper into her inspiration for her debut novel “Shark Heart,” Emily Habeck has said that she was inspired by the sublime, magnificent, and everydayness of the natural world.
She has said that she found that she felt some kind of awe writing about humans and animals in relationship with each other.

Whenever she went out hiking or camping, she always felt a more intimate reliance on the elements and nature than on humans and hence she feels closer to the reality of the animal world.
Moreover, she is also the person who worries about birds and bunnies who get hurt whenever there is a storm.

Once she had the idea for her novel, she did some research and began writing even though much of the research took place when she was about to finish writing.
For Habeck, it was important that she penned a novel where research and facts enhance the story.

Facts and research were used to complicate the inner lives of the characters, raise the stakes, and provide just enough information to keep readers engaged but not too much to create distance or be too intellectual.
As for her literary inspirations, she has said that she used to read from the likes of Eugene O’Neill, modern playwrights such as Suzan-Lori Parks, and Sarah Ruhl, and authors such as Flannery O’Connor.

During the writing itself, she used to listen to songs by Dustin O’Halloran the composer and pianist.

She also listened to Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver to help herself stay on course as writing especially for a unique and wild novel such as Shark Heart can be an act of self-trust.
When she is not writing her novels, she loves to read books by the likes of Julia May Jonas, Kate Folk, Tess Gunty, Cecilia Rabess, and Alice Elliot Dark.

Emily Habeck’s novel “Shark Heart” is a unique novel that tells the story of a young couple whose marriage collapses when the husband becomes a great white shark. Wren and Lewis are proof that opposites attract.
She is the breadwinner and is employed in finance while he is the solution-oriented and practical one.

Lewis is a dreamer who hopes to one day make it as an actor and has since gone back to Texas to become a teacher of theater in high school.

But then he begins to experience some worrying symptoms such as a hunger for fish, extra teeth, and insatiable thirst. He is suffering from the Carcharodon carcharias mutation, which means he is evolving into a great white shark.
As he becomes less human, Wren is scrambling to figure out how to move on from the life they had together. She also gets memories of her childhood when her stability and sense of safety were destroyed as she contemplates living as a single mother.
While it does seem to be tackling a serious matter, it unfolds in a playful manner than you would imagine.

Into the brief are woven play scripts, fragments of poetry, some footnotes, and sometimes single-sentence vignettes from the lives of Wren, Lewis, and her mother.
The result is a work that combines a little of Disney, Kafka, and Shakespeare as Habeck shows herself unafraid of talking animals, big proclamations, and sentiment.