Reviews of Post-Traumatic

The New York Times: An “emotionally complex debut.”

The New Yorker: A “sharp psychological novel.”

The Nation: “Post-Traumatic is the deepest literary dive yet into the psychology of the messy Black girl, and perhaps the most complex due to its granular representation of the somatic effects of trauma.”

Vulture: “Like The Bell Jar, Post-Traumatic reveals sociopolitical rot by way of one woman’s crack-up.”

Publishers Weekly (Starred Review): "A brutally funny and poignant debut…Dark humor is another coping mechanism for Vivian, which Johnson deploys with tremendous skill…Throughout, Vivian’s confrontational interactions feel achingly true to life. This is revelatory and powerful.”

The Boston Review: “Post-Traumatic resists the literary tendency to reduce traumatic experience to a well-defined story…For a novel that wears its relationship to trauma on its sleeve, its relationship to that word is always a question posed.”

Podcasts

Otherppl (in conversation with Brad Listi)

The Maris Review (in conversation with Maris Kreizman)

WNYC’s All of It (in conversation with Alison Stewart)

Open Form (in conversation with Mychal Denzel Smith about Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia)