Stop Me If You've Heard This One

LONGLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT AWARD 2025
From the New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things, a sparkling and funny new novel of entertainment, ambition, art, and love - for anyone who's ever been called funny as an insult
Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she's a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she's always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers.
Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent - a much older lesbian magician - who seems to have worked out the lines between art, business, and life, and has a slick, successful career to prove it. With Margot's mentorship and industry connections, Cherry is sure to take her art to the next level. Plus, Margot is sexy as hell. It's not long before Cherry must decide how much she's willing to risk for Margot and for her own explosive new act - and what kind of clown she wants to be under her suit.
Equal parts bravado, tenderness and humour, and bursting with misfits, magicians and mimes, Stop Me If You've Heard This One is a masterpiece of comedic fiction that asks big questions about art and performance, friendship and community, and the importance of timing in jokes and in life.

Kristen Arnett is the queer author of With Teeth (2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute, has held residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Key West Literary Seminar (upcoming 2024), and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. Her work has appeared at the New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She has lives in Orlando, Florida.