Praise for Rot
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"Rot, Janet Kauffman’s third novel, completes the trilogy Flesh Made Word, that she began with her first two novels, Collaborators and The Body in Four Parts. Like her other novels, Rot welcomes us into an odd, but nonetheless mesmerizing world in which the lines between self and other, human and nature, as well as flesh and word are eroded. ...What’s delightful about this novel is Kauffman’s imagery, her tender, concise language, her characters, and perhaps most of all, her sincerity."

–Michelle Ross, The Indian Review

"Janet Kauffman’s new novel confronts the near–impossibility of a simple, nonviolent death as she quietly examines the forces of evil and the nature of simplicity. She is in her element here, having grown up among the Mennonites on a tobacco farm in Pennsylvania, and having written an unusual breed of morally and ecologically concerned fiction without a drop of preachiness. ...Humor, sadness, and calm hang in perfect balance here, and it’s heartbreaking. ...Through her novels and stories, including the watery, shapeshifting The Body in Four Parts and the playful but provocative Characters on the Loose, Janet Kauffman has created a voice that is always recognizably her own—and yet it’s never the same. Here she takes on the gravity of death with characteristic levity, using as few words as possible to wrangle with the contradictions of life on earth."

–Carolyn Kuebler, Rain Taxi

"Eccentric, poetic, both high-minded and tough-minded, this novella is intermittently successful. When the author goes off the beam, we are left with a mere collection of oddballs, but when she is on, we behold something quite rare– dying as we hope it can be, a last embrace."

–Richard Lourie, The New York Times Book Review

"In Rot, Janet kauffman writes a reverie whose mistily voluminous main character, death, is regarded as a predator to be met calmly and equably, not tricked or resisted by the anxious, enterprising victim-to-be. ...Kauffman assays questions and yet avoids dictating answers. Instead, as she suggests, 'Moral ground is geologic – exist, be present as long, as harmlessly as possible, and then disappear.'"

–Molly McQuade, The Yale Review

Praise for Places in the World a Woman Could Walk
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"In this world of the farm, where women do men’s work and children become adults’ confidants, even the animals (even the enemy animals, like a grain-eating rat named Ratzafratz) are given the dignity of proper names. The people of Mrs. Kauffman’s passionate rural society do not draw the line between intimacy and strangeness. They name even the creatures they plan to kill."

–Wendy Lesser, New York Times Book Review

Praise for Obscene Gestures for Women
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"Perhaps it is her confidence in that power of the imagination in a broken world that allows Janet Kauffman to write stories so haunted by wise forgiveness."

– Robert Kelly, The New York Times Book Review

Praise for The Body in Four Parts
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"Kauffman’s language is right, luxurious and heaped-on, a slurry of earth and water."

–Jim Krusoe, Los Angeles Times Book Review