OKPsyche

Anya Johanna DeNiro  - published September 2023

trade paper · 160 pages · $15 · 9781618732088 | ebook · 9781618732095

Subjective Chaos Kind of Award Winner

In this playful and aching short novel, an unnamed trans woman is on an epic journey to find the place where she belongs. As she navigates her many realities, she must wrestle with anxieties and fears about the world. Her son and her ex live in another state. Environmental disasters are being outsourced to the Midwest. She can’t decide whether or not to unbox the companion automaton under her bed. And some of her friends may not just be ghosting her, they might not even be real.

OKPsyche is a fever-pitched odyssey through the joys, fears, and weirdness of trans adulthood, parenthood, and selfhood in the contemporary world.

Interview: Anya joins Mary Anne Mohanraj and Benjamin Rosenbaum on Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans

Lit Hub: 17 Best Covers of September

Read

Read a short excerpt, “Take Pills and Wait for Hips,” on Catapult / Listen on WNYC’s Selected Shorts read by Pooya Mohseni.

Q&A with Zhenya Loughney for The Daily Iowan.

A recommendation on Poets & Writers.

Reviews

“An incredible novel about trans motherhood. told in a world that is very realistically *now,* the narrator is closely, intimately real and viscerally true to life. one of the most beautifully wrought trans motherhood stories or books i’ve read.” — Jordan Kurella

“So perfect-weird and heart full and gorgeously written.” — Chloe N. Clark

“Gorgeous, raw, sharp, and tender, all at once, this book made me cry several times while I read it. Told with piercing emotional power fused with a surreal dream-logic all its own, reading this book felt like reading someone’s heart.” — Maria Haskins

“This novel tore my heart up—in the very best way. Our narrator is a semi-recently-out trans woman in her forties, she is an ex-wife, a mother separated from her son, and largely between stable work (a former writer, whose metafictions pepper the text). Friendships real and imagined provide a mirror of reflection in which our narrator turns the mundane into profound. This is a portrait of a woman who has so much love in her heart, and slowly learns to afford herself some of that love.” — Charlie, Room of One’s Own

“I was completely unprepared for how powerful Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is. Told in second person by a carefully unnamed narrator, the novel blends fantasy, science fiction, and absurdism; it’s also a very grounded and personal work. The narrator, a trans woman trying to reconnect with her young son, trying to find friendship and love in a hostile world, is aided by magical figures and contraptions, but it’s her voice that stands out. This is absolutely brilliant writing: raw and unflinching in how it portrays transphobia and self-doubt, sweeping and dynamic in its use of language and imagery.”
— Jake Casella Brookins, Locus

“Ultimately, though, it’s still a story that leaves me at a loss. For so small a volume, it looms too large to be captured in 1,000 words and change. It craves hand gestures, tone of voice, all the little things that tell the story when we can’t tell the story. So please, picture me waving my hands, leaning forward, emphasising that this book is something special. Because it is. And if you read it, hopefully you’ll be left speechless too.”
— Roseanna Pendlebury, Nerds of a Feather

“A dreamlike, speculative novel. . . . the heart of this short novel . . . is about the narrator’s journey as a trans woman, someone who’s trying to come to terms with the pain of her closeted past even as she struggles to find her way in a fragile, uncertain present.”
— Daily Hampshire Gazette

“In Anya Johanna DeNiro’s slim and shining new novel, ‘OKPsyche,’ published by Small Beer Press, based in Western Mass and run by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, is an exploration of ensoulment and embodiment, and the search for both, told by a trans woman in lush sink-into-it prose. Old snow takes on the look of “the coat of a cocker spaniel who needs a bath.” And “time compresses into apple seeds.” DeNiro, a trans author based in Minnesota, writes with vulnerability and force, looking at fear and shame, other people’s and the narrator’s own, looking at courage, at trans parenthood and love-finding, at the way reality and the people in it shift and bend, moving forward and backward at once. “Venus is clearly cis (myrtle, rose, apple, poppy). Venus is vengeful, unknowable (dove, sparrow, swan, hare, goat, ram) . . . Venus is able to make it up as she goes along.” In our world of violence and fires and floods, of hatred born of fear, of the regular messy tasks of living, DeNiro writes of what it is to locate, again and again, the deepest part inside oneself, with bravery, humility, and grace.”
— Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“. . . the second-person telling lets the reader in on a conversation this character is having with herself as she creates within herself the understanding that she needs: a sort of literary camera obscura that offers glimpses of how she pieces her historically disparate selves together.”
— E.C. Barrett,  Strange Horizons

“This story contains and covers multitudes. It ties its character to the sticking place, and we are bound as well, by a trans woman’s hopes, desires, losses, and visceral fears of the danger she faces every single day. Those dangers are indeed more real than imagined for a woman who doesn’t pass society’s purity test.”
— The Novel Approach

“DeNiro’s novel is a lyrical, emotionally powerful story about what it means to try and find a place for yourself in the midst of a hurricane of climate disaster, violence, and fear. It’s a story told through weird, ghostly, haunting fantasy. Fans of enigmatic speculative fiction like Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield (2022), will enjoy this tale of queer parenthood, of the reality of the sharp fear of trans lives, and of complicated self-discovery.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“An unnamed trans woman is at an uneasy stage in her metamorphosis. She has finally cast off the male persona that never fit her, but she has yet to become the woman she dreams of being. Part of her discomfort is physical—she does not have the body she wants—but much of it is social and emotional. She knows that most strangers do not see her for what she is. Her ex-wife is still adjusting to what is, for her, a surprising new reality. Her mother deadnames her. And, most importantly, her young son is shutting her out. DeNiro’s significant achievement here is making palpable the excruciating, inescapable self-consciousness of her main character. Her decision to narrate in the second person is a bold one; this move will help some readers immerse themselves in the story, but it will just as likely alienate others.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Beguiling. . . . a fascinating and often lovely weird fiction character study.”
— Publishers Weekly

Early Reader Reactions

“OKPsyche is a spectacular novel, like a shard of stained glass in brilliant reds and greens and purples. DeNiro shows us the impossible and the possible with equal honesty. The book is a chronicle of hope and hurt and freedom, suffused with anxiety and grace, and told in prose that just won’t quit. It’s major. You’ll remember where you were when you read it.”
— Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections

“Tense and funny, heartfelt and uncanny, Anya Johanna DeNiro takes us on an hallucinogenic tour through the mind of a woman on the edge. Guided by strange angels or losing touch with reality — either way, it’s happening to you!”
— Morgan M. Page, screenwriter of Framing Agnes

“DeNiro has done something beautiful here, weaving a luminous lament for a ruined world with the simmering pain of a woman finally coming to life. Delicate, lovely, and ultimately full of the impossible hope that shines forth in trans lives.”
— Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing

“An allegorical and lyrical short novel about a transgender woman struggling to belong in a near future populated by emotional support robots and a ceaseless slew of environmental disasters. DeNiro writes with a complexity that reflects the internal emotional struggles of her unnamed protagonist as she fights for happiness and a better relationship with her young son. A uniquely told and refreshingly weird story of self-realization and the courage it takes to love.”
— Sam Edge, Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews, Chapel Hill, NC

“DeNiro (City of a Thousand Feelings) offers a beguiling if somewhat opaque glimpse into a trans woman’s journey to find safety, acceptance, and love in a near-future Minnesota. . . . this is a fascinating and often lovely weird fiction character study.”
— Publishers Weekly

Reviews of Anya DeNiro’s books:

“That trust in emotional urgency over conventional logic to guide a story is, for me, a critical part of a queer aesthetic. Coming out is about obeying an interior, often inarticulable emotional push over majority logics. . . . DeNiro’s gorgeous and emotionally flawless navigation . . . is masterful, cerebral but full of complex feeling, and nothing short of word-magic.”
— Theodore McCombs, Fiction Unbound

“Surreal and lyrical.”
— Publishers Weekly

“What makes the story even more compelling, is that DeNiro gives you all this, allegory and action, without ever losing sight of the heart of the story: the fundamental bond and evolving relationship between two characters who choose different ways to survive, and yet find a greater power, and maybe even a new kind of salvation, when they come together.”
— Maria Haskins

“Strange, menacing worlds whose contours only gradually become clear (or, perhaps, more complexly mysterious).”
—Dylan Hicks, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Minnesotan DeNiro gives us large hunks of riveting weirdness.”
—Mary Ann Grossman, St. Paul Pioneer Press

“Wildness, fierceness, and anarchic imagination are traits, then, to be prized in this book, above beauty, order, and sense—or, in classical terms, the Dionysian over the Apollonian—and process.”
— Strange Horizons

“Each story feels new, unique, and important.”
—Leah Schnelbach, Tor.com

“There’s no other writer like DeNiro working today.” — Tim Pratt, Locus

Earlier

May 2: MIBA Spring Tour, Des Moines, IA
Sept. 14, 6 p.m. Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55406 (FB)
Oct. 14, 11 a.m., Twin Cities Book Fest, Fine Arts Stage, Minneapolis, MN
Oct. 27, 7 p.m. Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA
3/25, A Room of One’s Own, 2717 Atwood Ave., Madison, WI
5/8, KGB Bar, New York, NY, with John Wiswell
5/9, Astoria Bookshop, Queens, NY, with Nino Cipri

Cover Art

“Psyche Asleep in a Landscape,” Karl Joseph Aloys Agricola, 1837, metmuseum.org.

About the Author

Anya Johanna DeNiro is a trans woman and a speculative fiction writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of City of a Thousand Feelings, which was on the Honor Roll for the Otherwise Award. [website | twitter]