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Published Apr 2022
288 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
From the acclaimed author of Godshot and "a pitch-perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity" (T Kira Madden) comes a defining book of Californian stories where everyone is seeking or sabotaging love.
United by the stark and sprawling landscapes of California's Central Valley, the characters of Heartbroke boil with reckless desire. A woman steals a baby from a shelter in an attempt to recoup her own lost motherhood. A phone-sex operator sees divine opportunity when a lavender-eyed cowboy walks into her life. A mother and a son selling dream catchers along a highway that leads to a toxic beach manifest two young documentary filmmakers into their realm. And two teenage girls play a dangerous online game with destiny.
Heartbroke brims over with each character's attempt to salvage grace where they can find it. Told in bright, snapping prose that reveals a world of loss and love underneath, Chelsea Bieker brilliantly illuminates a golden yet gothic world of longing and abandonment under an unrelenting California sun.
"This wrenching collection from Bieker follows characters who wager on hope despite long odds and broken promises...Most stories are written in first person, their narrators giving vivid voice to the longings they still nurture despite everything. Throughout, Bieker's deeply human narrators bend the reader's ear with memorable stories." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"There is a Coen brothers–esque dark zaniness to their plots, which are full of hapless criminals and bumbling lovers, all filtered through lovely prose...In nearly all the stories, the mother-child relationship is the beating heart, a heart that is shot through with the poison of poverty, substance abuse, and disenfranchisement. But that Bieker finds such humor and poetry in that heart is a testament to both her skill and her tender affection for her wayward characters. Larger than life and darker than hell." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Bieker flexes a gift for the short form in her searing first collection. Each story draws readers in, moving them to love Bieker's crusty characters before ending just in time to satisfy...The volume is turned way up on the corruption of these characters' relationships and the severity of their missteps; such big, loud behavior creates ample space to observe their pulsing humanity. Readers will get lost in this riot of a collection, like a sun-bleached fever dream." - Booklist (starred review)
"A powerful collection; highly recommended." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Heartbroke made me feel as though I were watching a great dancer who has gone really deep into the music, all vitality and grace and a sense of dazzling risk. Chelsea Bieker is an absolutely crackling talent." - Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
"Heartbroke is astonishing—every story is still lodged in my throat. Bieker's lacerated world is filled with violent men, desperate women, abandoned children, all fighting for survival, dignity, and redemption. Bieker is refreshingly unsentimental but relentlessly compassionate, and has a virtuosic ability to inhabit her characters' suffering without flinching. Heartbroke should come with a warning: Absolutely devastating." - Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter and Stray
This information about Heartbroke 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.
Chelsea Bieker is the author of the novel Godshot, which was a finalist for both the Oregon and California Book Awards, long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, named an NPR Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Fiction Pick. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, The Cut, McSweeney's, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and other publications. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. Originally from California's Central Valley, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children.
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