Milk Blood Heat

A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.

A 13-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter — whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family's church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father's ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.

Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth, announcing the arrival of a bright new literary star.

“[In] Moniz’s collection, the ordinary experience of being female is laced with a kind of enchantment….Entire stories seem bathed in a warm radiance….One can glow with both love and rage.” New York Times

“Like snow in the Sunshine State — ‘There was a sense of betrayal in it. Like how dare Florida, of all places, try and turn a season’ — the short stories in Moniz’s first collection constantly surprise. In unvarnished, visceral prose, Moniz uses the ‘swampy stench’ of Florida as a backdrop to explore the internal and external perfidies of womanhood.” O, The Oprah Magazine, “20 of the Best Books of February 2021 to Fall in Love With”

“Electric….a tapestry of intimate moments punctuated by Moniz’s tight, uncompromising prose.” TIME

Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminars, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, Joyland, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Milk Blood Heat is her first book. She lives in Northeast Florida.