Meat Puppets: A Novel
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER NOW (click cover art)
Mitch Larkin has an uncanny knack for knowing when someone will become famous. But when he hedges his bets on a risky asset—the volatile Syd Morris—Mitch realizes he’s met his match. Madcap market-manipulation ensues in this stylish satire of aspiring actors and experimental investors.
Edited by Jacob Stovall
Design and artwork by Robert Voyvodic
258 pages, 5.5x8.5", paperback
Advance Praise for Meat Puppets
"Meat Puppets is a wild romp, full of scheming, ambition, and life." — Adam Levin, author of Bubblegum, The Instructions, and Hot Pink
"Hannah Smart’s Meat Puppets is the most wildly energetic and fiercely iconoclastic novel to come my way in, well, forever. Not content to shatter the fourth wall, it shatters pretty much all the walls. But it is also, I’m pleased to note, filled with memorable characters in dicey situations, and the ending is a 150 decibel affair that will take a while to recover from. Smart is not just a writer to watch. She’s a writer who made even this traditional realist marvel at such a bravura performance." —Steve Yarbrough, author of The Realm of Last Chances
"Hannah Smart is a tough name to live up to, even tougher to exceed, and this writer just drives way past it. Smart is a wizard, and Meat Puppets pulls off a great feat of magic: It freezes the world, spins it, helps it to make sense. This is a tremendous book." — David Lipsky, author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
"A blasted, cynical farce that shows by degrees how fallen our experience is." — Conor Hultman, author of DOE
About Hannah Smart
Hannah Smart’s short stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Globe,West Branch, The Harvard Advocate, Puerto del Sol, SmokeLong Quarterly, HAD, and Cleaver, among other outlets. Her work has been discussed in The New Yorker, shortlisted in The Masters Review 2023 Chapbook Open, nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, nominated for 2025’s Best of the Net anthology. She is the founder and editor in chief of experimental journal The Militant Grammarian. Her debut novel Meat Puppets is forthcoming from Apocalypse Confidential in May 2026.
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