Susann Cokal

She is best known for having written the novels The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Mirabilis, Mermaid Moon, and Breath and Bones, along with short stories, literary and pop-culture criticism, and book reviews.

She teaches literature of the last 150 years with an international perspective, often featuring Vladimir Nabokov (whom she has called one of her literary idols), Colette, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Knut Hamsun, Marcel Proust, Patrick Süskind, Sarah Waters, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf, and magic-realist authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Louise Erdrich, Gina Nahai, and Winterson.

In The New York Times, Sudip Bose wrote, "Cokal's prose is vivid, and she is adept at scenes ... that recreate a distant and terrifying world.

It brings to mind the question Martin Amis asked of Lolita: how was it possible to limit her adventures to this 300-page blue streak -- to something so embarrassingly funny, so unstoppably inspired, so impossibly racy?

[6] Cokal's third novel, The Kingdom of Little Wounds, was published in fall 2013 by Candlewick Press and (in the UK and Australia) Walker Books.

In an essay[11] for PillPack's Folks publication, Cokal described the writing of "Mermaid Moon" as helping her through the darkest days following a traumatic brain injury and complications from Sjogren's.

Though novels are her primary focus, Cokal has achieved some note as a short story writer, pop culture analyst, and literary scholar.

She is especially interested in Barbie and has written several short stories about people swept up in the culture of Mattel's best-known toy.

[13] After a traumatic head injury in 2012 destroyed her memory and some of her ability with language, Cokal wrote an essay on the experience for Hayden's Ferry Review.

[14] As she noted on her website in 2016, she never fully recovered from the concussion, which left her with severe chronic migraines and "a great blank in which I remember only a few bad things" for 2012.

These publications include articles on tuberculosis and metaphor in nineteenth-century Scandinavian novels, French philosopher and novelist Georges Bataille; "The Ergonomics of Feminine Space in The Sopranos," which appeared in Considering David Chase; "The Visual Aesthetics of Hygiene, Hot Sex, and Hair Removal" in POP-porn; and "Caught in the Wrong Story: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Structure in Tender Is the Night," a frequently cited article about F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrative form.