Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2016
208 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
In this beautifully restrained and exacting collection of short stories, the marginalized are set free to roam its pages and burn our assumptions to the ground.
In her debut story collection Heartbreaker, Maryse Meijer peels back the crust of normalcy and convention, unmasking the fury and violence we are willing to inflict in the name of love and loneliness. Her characters are a strange ensemble - a feral child, a girl raised from the dead, a possible pedophile - who share in vulnerability and heartache, but maintain an unremitting will to survive. Meijer deals in desire and sex, femininity and masculinity, family and girlhood, crafting a landscape of appetites threatening to self-destruct.
"Starred Review. A dark and surprising new voice in short fiction." - Kirkus
"Beneath these incendiary premises, the characters' relationships engender genuine empathy; Meijer is extraordinarily adept at tapping into a well of existential loneliness brought on by civilization's tendency and shame." - Publishers Weekly
"The finely etched stories of Heartbreaker are glorious with menace and mystery. Maryse Meijer writes straight into the fire to retrieve the violent ache, the insatiable desire, the trembling love at its hot, hot center. These are terrifying, surprising, beautiful stories, for which I couldn't be more grateful." - Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away
"Maryse Meijer has written a scowl of a book, a gleaming hungry mouth, a chomp. You feel lucky to get out alive, and then you just feel lucky. There you are, missing the danger, longing again for its toothed beauty. Heartbreaker is a bright and dark joy." - Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls
"Reading Heartbreaker gives you the feeling of a sucker punch with the attendant knowledge that you deserved it." - Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot
This information about Heartbreaker was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Maryse Meijer's work has appeared in Meridian, The Saint Ann's Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Portland Review, and actual paper. She lives in Chicago.
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