Sarah Rose Etter Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Sarah Rose Etter
Sarah Rose Etter’s work has appeared in The Bennington Review, VICE, Time, The Cut, BOMB, Guernica, as well as other places.

Sarah’s been awarded residences at the Disquiet International program in Portugal, the Jack Kerouac House, and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland. She received her MFA in fiction from Rosemont College and BA in English from Pennsylvania State University.

“The Book of X” won a Shirley Jackson for Best Novel. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by Thrillist, Entropy, Vulture, and Buzzfeed. The book also made the 2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist.

At the age of 15, she started working as a fry girl, and she has not stopped since. It was always baked into her mind that there was nobody coming to bail her out. There was no inheritance waiting for her.

“The Book of X” really taught her a lot about how to write a novel. However novels are truly humbling. She doesn’t believe that she will ever master it, and that is why she wants to keep on doing it. One thing that she hopes she will always be able to say is, she did the best at the time that she knew how to. When she thinks about the next thing, she gets excited because she could be better next time.

Sarah has to outline. Everyday she sits down to write, she knows exactly what she’ll be putting down on paper. The end result is that the scene is incredibly compressed, and it has to end with a punch right in the gut, almost like poetry or flash fiction.

Sarah’s earliest memory that she associates with “Ripe” is that much like Cassie, she worked in Silicon Valley for a year. It made her parents incredibly proud and felt like a huge deal. However then she got there, and realized it was not quite what she believed it’d be.

During her first week in San Francisco, she stopped in a coffee shop. The owner was working the counter and made her a coffee, and they got to talking about where they were from, that type of thing. And she mentioned that the night before, this man set himself on fire just outside of her store. The woman had tried to put the flames out and was very shaken up about it. Hearing this knocked the wind out of Sarah. It was this moment that Sarah got the sense that she might be living in a bad place. It was the moment that the illusion of San Francisco was shattered for her.

The most surprising thing that she noticed while writing “Ripe” was that she wound up attempting to preserve the memories she had of her dad while writing it. All of a sudden the dad in the novel really morphed into a way to immortalize her dad. His way of thinking about work and business, his advice, his love of museums, these were all things that she was afraid she was going to forget about him.

Along the way, the book became a way to make sure she did not forget anything about him. She was so deep into her grief when she wrote this book, that she can remember worrying that she’d forget how her dad’s voice sounded. So the novel is deeply personal to Sarah; it’s very close to her heart and very complex.

“The Book of X” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2019. A surreal exploration of a woman’s life and death against this landscape of office desks, meat, and bad men.

This is the story of Cassie, this girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on her family’s meat farm, to her desk job in the city, to experiencing love finally, she grapples with society, men, and her body, all as she imagines a softer world than the one that she finds herself in.

Twining the drama of the everyday: paying bills, school age crushes, the sickness of parents, along with the surreal: men for sale, rivers of thighs, and fields of throats, Cassie’s realities alternate to create a fantastic and blurred world of haunting beauty.

Fans of the novel loved every single page of this grotesque, gorgeous, and heartbreaking novel. Sarah brilliantly and viciously lays bare what it truly means to be a woman in this world, what it means to need, to hurt, to want, so much that it consumes everything.

“Ripe” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2023. A surreal novel about this woman in Silicon Valley that has to decide just how much she is willing to give up for her success.

One year into her dream job at this cutthroat Silicon Valley start up, Cassie finds that she is trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the toxic bosses, the long hours, and the unethical projects, she also has a tough time reconciling the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives right along side abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads continue complaining about the snack selection from a conference room with this view of unhoused people that are bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap right into the paths of commuter trains, and there are men setting themselves on fire out in the streets.

Cassie, even though isolated, is never alone. From her earliest memory, this miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her anxiety and depression, shrinking or growing in relation to her distress. The black hole is watching, but it’s also waiting. Its relentless pull draws her ever closer while the world around her continues to crumble.

She winds up getting pregnant unexpectedly at the same exact time her CEO’s demands cross into some illegal territory. Cassie has to decide whether tempting the fruits of Silicon Valley are actually worth it or not. Vulnerable yet sharp, darkly comic yet unsettling, “Ripe” portrays one millennial woman’s journey through our late-capitalist hellscape and offers up a brilliantly incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.