Pearce Oysters

A fractured family, a devastated community, and the disaster that brings them together.

Pearce Oysters, a lush, evocative, finely-drawn debut novel set on the Louisiana coastline during the historic 2010 oil spill, follows the Pearce family, local oyster farmers whose business, family, and livelihood are all on the brink of collapse.

Eye-opening, eco-fiction at its best, Pearce Oysters highlights the grit and beauty of lives lived in an overlooked corner of the American South and the interdependence of nature and man. Diving deep into the bonds of family, culture, community, class, and industry, blazing new talent Joselyn Takacs elevates the voices of her deeply sympathetic characters: Jordan, the reluctant head of his family's storied oyster business; May, his distressed, widowed mother who has her own unexpected drama; and Benny, the beatnik musician brother, who returns from New Orleans to help with the crisis.

Inspired by years of her own research, Takacs's debut novel sparkles as it shines a light on murky waters, old wounds, the power of a family clinging to survival, and their inspiring path forward.

Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. Joselyn has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband.