Johanna Stoberock

Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novel City of Ghosts. Her honors include the James W. Hall Prize for Fiction, an Artist Trust GAP award, and a Jack Straw Fellowship. In 2016 she was named runner-up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Best of the Net anthology, and Catamaran, among others. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington, where she teaches at Whitman College.


All Books

Pigs

Johanna Stoberock

Publication Date: October 1, 2019

$16.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-044-5

Description:

In the tradition of Lord of the FliesPigs is an exquisitely wrought fable about the excesses of the contemporary world.

Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them. Written in exquisitely wrought prose, Pigs asks questions about community, environmental responsibility, and the possibility of innocence.

AWARDS

SHORTLISTED – 2020 Neukom Awards for Speculative Fiction
BRONZE – 2019 Foreword Literary Fiction

ADVANCE PRAISE

“A lyrical, enthralling, and dark-inflected allegory, equal parts Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and Lord of the Flies.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of A Gambler’s Anatomy and The Feral Detective

“Powerful, metaphorical, as fantastical as it is true, Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs is a masterpiece. Stoberock scrutinizes mankind’s failure to tend to our planet, our children, and our fellow man, and the result is a terrifying, tremendous book, its darkness lit in unpredictable ways by campfires of compassion and hope. What a wise, searing novel for the twenty-first century.”—Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra and The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac

Pigs looks unflinchingly at some of the scariest parts of our world—a changing climate, an ocean full of garbage, and us, the fragile animals. Yet within this, there is tremendous beauty and grace—Johanna Stoberock has written a kind of love song to survival, to life itself.”—Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

News

PIGS by Johanna Stoberock included on Seattle Met’s “A Big Seattle Reading List”!

This grim, weirdo allegory—a little Lord of the Flies, a little Animal Farm—sets us down on a dystopian island inhabited by pigs that eat the world’s refuse: toasters, radioactive waste, toenail clippings. Four kids also live here, moving this garbage from the coast to the pigsty. Some adults also occupy the island as a ruling class. Then […]

Johanna Stoberock, author of PIGS; Kristen Millares Young, author of SUBDUCTION; and Elissa Washuta, author of MY BODY IS A BOOK OF RULES featured in the Seattle Met reading list!

Pigs by Johanna Stoberock (2019) This grim, weirdo allegory—a little Lord of the Flies, a little Animal Farm—sets us down on a dystopian island inhabited by pigs that eat the world’s refuse: toasters, radioactive waste, toenail clippings. Four kids also live here, moving this garbage from the coast to the pigsty. Some adults also occupy the […]

Pigs on the TODAY show

For June, the Read With Jenna book club dove into Megha Majumdar’s debut novel, “A Burning.” The book tackles themes of class, fate and corruption in contemporary India through the stories of three characters, whose lives intertwine after a terrorist attack. If you’re ready to dive into more similar stories after finishing “A Burning,” Majumdar has five […]

New Books Network interviews Johanna Stoberock, author of PIGS!

In her new novel Pigs (Red Hen Press, 2019), Johanna Stoberock has written a lyrical fable about an island that receives all the world’s garbage. That garbage, both physical and psychological in the forms of dreams and memories, is consumed by six enormous, voracious pigs. Four filthy, starving children wearing rags and living in squalor are responsible for sorting […]

Campaign for the American Reader features PIGS by Johanna Stoberock!

Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system. But when a barrel washes ashore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of […]

Johanna Stoberock shares her vision for PIGS as a movie with My Book, The Movie!

Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novels Pigs and City of Ghosts. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Better: Culture & Lit, The Wilson Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Front Porch, and the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology. Here Stoberock shares her vision for a trailer of an adaptation of Pigs: Envisioning Pigs as a movie is hard, particularly because, central to […]

Booktalk podcast discusses Johanna Stoberock’s PIGS!

The pigs are beautiful, but fierce, with sharp teeth and insatiable appetites, and they eat anything. When a boy washes ashore in a barrel, the children must decide what to do with him—is he more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or is he one of them? The novel explores […]

Reviews

PIGS by Johanna Stoberock reviewed by Full Stop!

Islands provide fertile territory for utopian visions. For Thomas More, Utopia itself was an island, a self-enclosed little atoll just beyond the horizon where the best of all possible worlds could be found. For J.M. Barrie, Neverland was an island, a place where dreams came true and children never grew up. Writing about California – […]

Johanna Stoberock’s PIGS reviewed by bookstagrammer @bookynooky!

PIGS takes place on an island on which all the Earth’s trash washes ashore. Four children must collect the trash (plastic, uneaten food, nuclear waste, unwanted advise, ect.) and feed it to six monstrous pigs. This cycle has seemingly been going on forever. Oh yeah, on the island there are also adults whose sole purpose […]

On the Seawall reviews PIGS by Johanna Stoberock!

There’s a dreaminess to childhood rebellion, the moments when children viscerally understand that the adults don’t know what they are doing. Some of the most memorable moments in European arthouse films of the 20th century capture this phenomenon for the purpose of critiquing authoritarianism and the adult world order in all its arbitrary, unjust, cruel ugliness. […]

Johanna Stoberock’s PIGS reviewed by Booklist!

In Stoberock’s extraordinarily imaginative novel, four children live on a desert island where all the world’s waste washes ashore. They are tasked with the arduous, abject, and unrelenting work of feeding all of it to six insatiably hungry giant pigs. Moreover, a group of nameless and sadistic adults rule the island, and the children must […]

The Rumpus calls Johanna Stoberock’s PIGS a “beautiful and unsettling novel”!

In the popular imagination, pigs simply exist to consume and to be consumed. We revile them because they are seen as gluttonous animals, indiscriminate in their pursuit for satiation, and because they are dirty, wallowing happily in their own filth. Johanna Stoberock’s novel Pigs uses these stereotypes—the rapacious, prosaic nature of these beasts—to amplify the grotesque impulse […]