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About Heartbreaker: Stories
Product Description 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. In beautifully restrained and exacting prose, she sets the marginalized free to roam her pages and burn our assumptions to the ground. Review The Chicago Review of Books Best Fiction Books of 2016 Electric Literature 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016 Largehearted Boy's Favorite Short Story Collections of 2016 "Meijer’s stories are intense and threatening, with language that invigorates the senses. Like the writers of her ilk ― [Lindsay] Hunter, Amelia Gray, Laura van den Berg ― Meijer makes the dangers of girlhood come alive, crafting characters who flirt with violence." ―Maddie Crum, The Huffington Post “[Meijer] reaches into the darkest parts of the human psyche where sexuality, vulnerability, and violence commingle and simmer . . . 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 "Meijer’s unerring knack for finding the pure shape of a story―for lining up the component images and complications in the just the right order―marks her as something quite rare. Her stories captivate in the way that urban legends do, splicing the sensational into the fearfully mundane. Even as they subvert the expectations of various relationships, the stories don’t feel new. They feel lived in, re-discovered, like old stories being told for the first time in a long time." ―Michael Deagler, The Rumpus “The edgy stories in Meijer’s debut collection cut like so many wild teeth: sharp, deep, and unforgiving . . . Meijer breaks open taboos about sex, disability, melancholy, and violence with the careful precision of a teenager egging the house of her mortal enemy. Here is all the raw anger, fear, malice, lust, and confusion of women used to threats, stalking, and ceaseless observation, who live with their lives hanging every day in the balance. In fiction, Meijer seems to say, they have a shot at making their own rules―and the results are strange, unsettling, and addictive . . . In deft, clear prose, Meijer takes everyday moments of loss and loneliness and threads them through with elements of the gothic, fantasy, and fairy tale . . . Taut and ruthless, Meijer's tales somehow manage to be both believable in their strangeness and recognizable in their pointed cruelties. Here are the misfits, the overweight, and the lonely. The obsessives and the broken. Here are the monsters―and they look an awful lot like you. A dark and surprising new voice in short fiction.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “The characters in Meijer’s debut collection of short stories are defined by their obsessions and are brought to life in quick, deft strokes. To enter their lives, however briefly, is to enter a warped world in which convention is upended and consequences only implied. Meijer’s writing is arresting and disturbing, burning with clarity at even the most complex moments . . . The sharpness with which these people are drawn, largely without context beyond the immediate situation, only reinforces the strangeness of the tales they inhabit, and leaves the reader with burning questions unanswered.” ―Bridget Thoreson, Booklist “This blurred line between animal and woman, and the notion that these hybrid women cannot and will not be domesticated, runs through every story in Heartbreaker. Yet each iteration feels freshly uncomfo
