"At any given moment in Dirty Joke, I am simultaneously lost and located. I know where I am—in New Jersey, in a “temperate rain forest,” in some circle or another of Hell—yet at the same time I’m spun up in the narration’s feverish dream logic, caught and released through the webs and holes trauma makes of memory. What tenderness I felt for young Coco and her adult-self protector as they navigate the horror of mothers, the insult of childhood, the fascist overlay on their Italian American identity—but also, always, humor, resistance, incredible bravery. This is a remarkable novel that salutes its influences while being unlike anything I’ve ever read. It will stay with me for a long, long time."
— Sara Jaffe

"Dirty Joke is a novel that is blazingly alive, bursting at the seams with humor, desire and possibility. It is a rare, complete vision of the true nature of familial trauma—like David Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me, Dirty Joke uses its own magical, frightening language to not only show us where abuse comes from but how it, and living through its aftermath, feels. I will return to this novel again and again when I need to remember what literature is for, what it can do."
— Max Delsohn

"Dante Alighieri built a world where injustice had an answer, and the same is true for his heir apparent, Corinne Manning, in this divine update that brings to bear formal daring, confessional grace, and a legendary cast of all-Italian spirits to tell the story of one family, marked by violation, and of what a complicated, answering justice may look like in a new queer age. And yes the jokes are filthy, too: a wonder."
— Jeanne Thornton