OKPsyche
a novel
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.
'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
Anya Johanna DeNiro is a fiction writer and editor living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of City of a Thousand Feelings and the forthcoming short novel OKPysche. Her fiction has been on the Honor Roll for the Otherwise Award, on the shortlist for the O.Henry Award, and a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Catapult, Strange Horizons, DIAGRAM, Asimov's, and Fence.
