NORMA

Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.

It’s a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.

Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she’s free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It’s all of humanity—grim, funny, and desperate—wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.

NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.

Sarah Mintz is a graduate of the English MA program at the University of Regina. Her work has been published with Book*Hug Press, JackPine Press, Apocalypse Confidential, The Sea & Cedar Literary Magazine, and Agnes and True. Her flash fiction collection handwringers was published with Radiant Press. NORMA is her debut novel. Find out more at https://smintz.carrd.co.

Praise for NORMA

“Mintz is able to balance a clear-eyed, almost ruthless narrative precision with a voluble subtextual empathy. It’s a delicate feat and results in a powerful, destabilizing examination of loss, age and the darkness that—potentially—awaits us all.”—Toronto Star

“For a novel 30 pages shy of 200, NORMA is surprisingly abundant. Reaching for metaphors, the novel is meaty, a thicket; NORMA brings to mind osmium, the densest naturally occurring element. It’s intense. … Marred, rambling, incomplete, and terminally misguided, Norma captivates on the page. Any fan of Canadian fiction will link Mintz’s character with Hagar Shipley, the raging force of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. There’s a family resemblance, certainly. With their anguish and sharp humour, the women of Malarky and Bina, Anakana Schofield’s novels, spring to mind as well. This ‘lumbering ruin in a sea of waxed plastic’ who is ‘not bitter, not bitter. No. Just old’ serves credibly as a declaration from Sarah Mintz, the author of a star-turn by a prickly and deluded gale-force character whose every sentiment enlivens the page.”—Vancouver Sun

“Gorgeous, evocative prose.”—Winnipeg Free Press

“In this slim volume, Mintz showcases an astounding capacity to use her prose as both straightforward narrative and wild experiment….The beauty of NORMA is how Mintz shows us the uncertain, ugly, and undesirable bits of a woman in crisis, and then brings us close to her with a sense of communal, relatable humanity. For those who are interested in reading a short, experimental novel that explores the stuff of life that connects us to others, NORMA will not disappoint.”—The BC Review

“Three days ago I didn’t know Sarah Mintz existed; now I want to know where the hell she’s been all my reading life. (Canada, apparently.) NORMA is a spiky, apothegmatic wonder written in laser-guided prose. It’s a very funny book about grief, prurience, and anger, as resonant and memorable as it is brief and bizarre. Now that I know Mintz is out there, I’ll read anything and everything she writes.”—Justin Taylor, author of Reboot

“NORMA by Sarah Mintz [is a] hilarious, thoughtful, and melancholic examination of grief, loneliness, and newfound companionship.”—Paul Carlucci, author of The Voyageur

“Sarah Mintz is a writer who knows what’s going on. Using language like a fire escape, NORMA is a sublime farrago that enlivens the slow shock of aging, sees into and speaks from all the various places we live, and also don’t live: our bodies, the stores just down the block, our mind-resistant brains. This is part telenovela, part Beckettian mumble and scavenger hunt and data stream. Always compassionate, and with such intelligence and strange beauty, NORMA captures our moment and will live beyond it.”—Michael Trussler, author of The History Forest

“A fresh and unexpectedly disarming book about the messiness of modern life. Norma is a woman under the influence of old age and increasing isolation, but it’s not long before she’s careening down a madcap marble run toward something approaching self-discovery. There’s something about the voice of this book that just crackles, like slowly scanning across an AM dial to hear an ever-growing chorus of entrancing but mysterious characters emerge partway through the static. Norma’s attempts to re-wire her life in search of connection render a story of aging and grief that’s somehow fizzy, existential, and honest-to-god funny. It moves with a slightly warped sense of self-assurance, poking its head into spaces as odd yet familiar as soap operas, grocery stores, and online message boards. An offbeat delight!”—Bryan Seitz, Literati Bookstore