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From the author of Heartbreaker, a disquieting collection tracing the destructive consequences of the desire for connection.
A man, forgotten by the world, takes care of his deaf brother while euthanizing dogs for a living. A stepbrother so desperately wants to become his step-sibling that he rapes his girlfriend. In Maryse Meijer's decidedly dark and searingly honest collection Rag, the desperate human desire for connection slips into a realm that approximates horror.
Meijer's explosive debut collection, Heartbreaker, reinvented sexualized and romantic taboos, holding nothing back. In Rag, Meijer's fearless follow-up, she shifts her focus to the dark heart of intimacies of all kinds, and the ways in which isolated people's yearning for community can breed violence, danger, and madness. With unparalleled precision, Meijer spins stories that leave you troubled and slightly shaken by her uncanny ability to elicit empathy for society's most marginalized people.
"Starred Review. Outstanding and disturbing...Though reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill, Jean Rhys, and Muriel Spark, these 14 stories bear a powerful style that is Meijer's own." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A rich, beautiful, and utterly terrifying book." - Kirkus
"These stories are extremely good. I could reference masters of the particular as far flung as Thomas Bernhard or Lucia Berlin, but the resonance of Maryse Meijer's ultra-precise prose is too unique. Rag is truly something else." - Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
"Maryse Meijer is a fearless writer. In these wild and inventive stories, Meijer brilliantly channels the most unsettled corners of the human heart. Rag is a glittering nightmare, a wilderness aflame with violence and desire, a harrowing and profound collection." - Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
"Maryse Meijer is a master of the dark arts, transforming moments of everyday dysphoria into evocative sculptures of loss, aching and oozing with life. In her hands, existence becomes a thing to be felt anew: visceral, fleshly, and almost unbearably human. These stories will shake you." - Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
This information about Rag 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 is the author of the story collection Heartbreaker, which was one of Electric Literature's 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016. Her work has appeared in Meridian, Portland Review, Washington Square Review, Indiana Review, and actual paper. She lives in Chicago.
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