Heartbroke

November 1, 2021

After debuting with the multi-award-finalist Godshot, Bieker returns with stories of Heartbroke characters whose loves and losses unfold in California's sunstruck Central Valley. Former Wallace Stegner Fellow Folk debuts with a collection of absurdist stories, including Out There, a piece published in The New Yorker about a woman whose attempts to use a dating app are disrupted by incredibly handsome yet artificial men deployed by Russian hackers. Acquired in a two-book deal that includes his debut novel, NYU Starworks fellow Friedlander's The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land is set in Israel and the Middle East and features outsiders who must contend with past sorrow or future uncertainty. A second collection after Light Lifting, which was short-listed for Giller, Commonwealth, and Frank O'Connor honors, MacLeod's Animal Person explores those moments when one's life is about to change (25,000-copy first printing). From poet Mirosevich, also author of the award-winning nonfiction Pink Harvest, Spell Heaven offers linked stories about a lesbian couple finding happiness in a coastal town. From Newman, whose memoir Still Points North was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle's John Leonard Prize, Nobody Gets Out Alive highlights women struggling to get by in rugged Alaska (50,000-copy first printing). Witchcraft, blue jaguars, and a California rainforest-set novella starring Maria, Maria and possibly more Marias all feature in this mystical debut from former PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow Rubio.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 31, 2022
This wrenching collection from Bieker (Godshot) follows characters who wager on hope despite long odds and broken promises. In “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Miners,” a bartender’s aspiration to attend a community college writing class is thwarted by her miner boyfriend, whose increasingly controlling behavior echoes her family history. “Cowboys and Angels,” about a naive phone sex operator who falls for a con man, is darkly comic, though overall the mood is one of fragile optimism that’s easily shattered. In “Women and Children First,” a woman whose own daughter has been placed in foster care seizes a doomed opportunity to nurture an addict’s baby. In the title story, a grieving mother writes (but doesn’t send) letters to her young gay son about the siblings he never knew, chasing an improbable desire to “feel my joy and know it was safe to feel joyful.” 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. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt Agency.

Starred review from March 1, 2022

In the heartbreaking title story of Bieker's exemplary first collection, following the multi-award-finalist Godshot, a woman mourns the death of two babies lost to a fire years ago while writing to an estranged son she had later, explaining the depth of her pain and how much she regrets not being a good enough mother to him: "This life don't make sense and I don't just listen to sad cowboy songs, no. I go looking for them." She's balanced on a knife's edge, considering what she can and cannot do, and what's impressive is how much play Bieker gives all her characters; how will their stories really end? A teenager mourns the disappearance of her bossy best friend yet appears implicated; what is she really feeling? A young woman excited about her new English class ("it seemed to unchain the fighting dogs in my chest") gets involved with the wrong man, but even while pregnant resists staying with him. Realizing that her father is abusing his latest woman, she says presciently, "She had already decided on her life. But I hadn't decided on mine." VERDICT A powerful collection; highly recommended.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2022
The down-at-the-heels and lovelorn of the American West battle addictions, exploitation, and abandonment. If Bieker's debut novel, Godshot (2020), were an acclaimed television series, Heartbroke would be its spinoff. These 11 stories feature Bieker's characteristic protagonists: na�ve, mainly female, flattened by poverty, and desperate to cling to whatever helps make sense of the world or, rather, the corner of it Bieker retraces: namely, central California, where the bulk of these stories are set. (And in true spinoff fashion, characters from Godshot even pop up occasionally here.) Bieker hasn't let up on the drama any in these narratives, either; 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. ("I had me a cowboy once on a hot steam Friday night, on a hot go all the way time, just us together in his truck" reads the beginning of the heist tale "Cowboys and Angels.") In the opening story, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Miners," a college-age barmaid takes up with an abusive miner called Spider Dick and tries to figure out what her dead mother would have wanted her to do with her life. In the affecting "Lyra," a brothel madam hosts a young academic writing a dissertation about sex work and a long-ago crime that the madam knows far more about than she's saying. 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.

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Starred review from February 15, 2022
Bieker (Godshot, 2020) 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. Every engrossing piece takes place, as the stellar Godshot did, in California's rural Central Valley. The disenfranchised, impoverished, exploited, and manipulative characters are raisin farmers, sex workers, miners, mothers, addicts, and cowboys. In one story, a mother battling alcoholism kidnaps a baby from a women's shelter. In another, two ex-wives of the same man live together and care for one woman's disabled adult sister. A young gay man buries his sexuality to survive his father's rage. A teenager with a slimy stepfather and an internet boyfriend goes missing. In one particularly memorable piece, a PhD candidate arrives from out of town to write about violence against rural women, and becomes twisted in a desire to experience their trauma firsthand. 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.

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