The Most

"Jessica Anthony's spare, elegant novella... is darkly funny in its own way, and in the end is less a comedy than a smoldering, Cheeveresque mediation on mid-century, middle-class disappointment.”

“The Most blindsided me with its power….This superb short novel, about a marriage at its breakpoint, deserves to become a classic….Anthony has served an ace.”

"Riveting"

“With this seemingly small act of female rebellion, novelist Jessica Anthony leads us into the secret upheaval of marriage, good-girl American society, and a silenced female fury and ambition. Get ready, readers. The Most is exquisitely written, heady rush of story that you can—and probably will—finish in a few hours, before your sunscreen needs reapplying.”

"A vaguely disenchanted midcentury housewife enters her swimming pool on a warm November day — and decides not to leave. A quick but psychologically acute read by the author of “Enter the Aardvark” with a vivid sense of time and place (not just the pool)."

“Distilling this novel down to just these elements misses its other dimensions, how it captures an anxiety both specific to its time and broadly relatable, how its narrator twists and diverts the story at will, and how in under 150 pages we are presented and taken through an incredibly nuanced conflict…. Jessica Anthony renders the pathos of older domestic dramas such as Revolutionary Road, but with an admirable economy of words and a creative omniscient narrator."

“A perfect little novel that feels like a classic American piece of literature…it is tight and funny and interesting, it has great playfulness and I think anybody who wants to read something different – this is for you!”

“Can the secrets and misdeeds of a marriage be survived?... Anthony’s sharply focused portrait of seemingly average lives in midcentury America reveals the complexities of those lives in the course of one balmy day. A novella packing all the imagery and storytelling power of a novel.”

“Sensational…exceptional…Readers won’t want to put this down.”

“An exquisite, taut literary mousetrap—this is a tale of sport in every sense of the word, of game and play, winning and losing, strategy and choice. If the secret of jazz, our male protagonist’s hidden passion, is the notes they don’t play, then the secret of this aching novella is the words the characters don’t say to each other. Jessica Anthony’s writing is a thunderous, polyphonic music all its own.”

“With Enter the Aardvark Jessica Anthony proved herself to be one of the most inventive writers working today. That book should have prepared me for her ingenious new novella, The Most, but somehow it didn’t. Trust me, though. The Most is a must.”

"The Most charges the air like a thunderclap when a married couple reckons with their past and the masks they hide behind. You will race to find out who they are and who they might become. Jessica Anthony’s riveting novel is stellar. She has quickly become one of my favorite writers."

“Jessica Anthony’s The Most is a brilliant and startling domestic fable of longing. The novel captures a haunting unrest at the core of midcentury American life, treating its aimlessly striving characters with a stern caress of grace. The Most is a novel of ruthless beauty. I read it in one perfect sitting.”

"The Most achieves the impossible: it says something new about marriage. In this thrilling novel, Anthony's genius for structural and chronological invention is grounded in sensory richness and the most vividly idiosyncratic characters I’ve encountered in a while. This is a 21st century literary classic waiting to happen.”