Staff Pick
Heartbreaker is an earthshaking short story collection that will break you. Maryse Meijer plumbs the depths of human desire and pushes our possibility for empathy outward — far past the edge where our moral norms teeter. Among these stories is a man in love with the life-destroying fire he brought into the world, a girl at fat camp who has an affair with a fox, a mother who has a man come play her daddy whenever her family leaves the house, and a young woman who despairs after being brought back from a violent death. Besides the titular promise that she fulfills at every turn, Meijer's precise pose wields the erotic and the taboo to uproot our every expectation. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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.