Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Battleborn was named a Best Book of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Time Out New York, and Flavorwire, and a Best Short Story Collection by NPR.org. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named Claire one of the 5 Best Writers Under 35. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the Southwest 2013, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno and the Ohio State University, Claire has received fellowships from the Writers’ Conferences at Sewanee and Bread Loaf. An assistant professor at Bucknell University, Claire is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.
Winner of the 2012 Story Prize
Recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Award
Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013
Rosenthal Family Foundation Award
Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction
writers of 2012
Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012
A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best
Book of the year, and more . . .
“A real treat… Through remarkably assured writing that manages to
be both bristly and brittle, Watkins chronicles despair and
loneliness, catalogs valiant fights for survival and desperate
please to be heard, and every time has us rooting for her
underdogs.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Dazzling.” –O, The Oprah Magazine
“Although individual stories stand alone, together they tell the
tale of a place, and of the population that thrives and perishes
therein… The historical sits comfortably alongside the contemporary
and the factual nicely supplements the fictional… Readers will
share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken
into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other
side—wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.” –Antonya
Nelson, The New York Times Book Review
"The most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie
Proulx - though it's to early Joan Didion that [Watkins] bears
comparison for her arid humor and cut-to-the-chase knowingness."
–Vogue
“The most exciting book of fiction I read this past year…To me, her
gift is akin to that of those rare actors, like a Streep or a
Brando, who can totally become a character but retain their own
essence through and through…Fantastic stuff.”–Chang-rae Lee, A Year
in Reading, The Millions
“Exceptional… A writer of great precision and greater restraint,
Watkins is a natural storyteller whose material enriches that gift
rather than engulfing it… One doesn’t have to be from the
Battleborn state to recognize and appreciate literature that
resonates like this.” –The Rumpus
"[A] breathtaking debut… [Watkins'] stories… carry the weight and
devastation of entire novels.” –Flavorpill
"Absorbing… [Battleborn’s] true setting is a Faulknerian desert of
the heart, where the soil is cursed by its precious metals and
one’s personal history can be just as toxic. Clear-eyed and nimble
in parsing the lives of her Westerners, one of Watkins’s strengths
is not dodging that the simple fact that love can be tragic,
involving, as it does, humans so flawed, so often tender and yet
incapable.” –The Boston Globe
“A powerful new voice that deserves recognition… [Watkins maps] a
regional portrait while pausing for detailed sketches, with a
strong perspective that blends the romanticized past of Larry
McMurtry, heartbreaking characters of Annie Proulx, and bleak
timeless landscapes of Cormac McCarthy.” –The Onion AV Club
“As if Watkins’ prose embodies the desert landscape of Nevada
itself, the stories are stony, unkind, and harsh, though never
unattractive… Beneath these confessions runs a spiritual
undertow—that salvific beauty can arise when brutality is brought
to light… All of her stories left me feeling purged and oddly
cleansed, easily making Battleborn one of the strongest collections
I’ve read in years.” –The Millions
"Her incredible talent fills every page of this raw, wild, soaring
debut. She may be the coolest real-life literary lady we've
discovered in quite a while." –Flavorwire
“As grounded as they are in real places, the stories are fictions,
crafted with the skill of an artisan, working from the starting
points of Mary Gaitskill and Aimee Bender.” –Los Angeles Times
"These stories are as spare and beautifully austere as the
landscape of the American Southwest where they are set, the same
landscape that shapes and hardens the characters and refines them
down to their fundamental elements, working them until they are all
sinewy muscle and steely resolve. This is a stunning debut from an
important young writer, and if it is a promise of what’s to come in
the future of American fiction, we are in very good hands indeed."
–Bookriot
"Vibrant and assured… The settings of Watkins' home state—evoked
with craft that echoes Cormac McCarthy or Richard Ford—were the
perfect settings for heartbreak." –Time Out New York
"What distinguishes Watkins' work… is her command of time. Nearly
all the stories are set in the present, but her characters
constantly live with aftereffects of the past. They're not simply
"scarred" by history; they're irradiated by it, queasily lit from
within.” –Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“[An] assured debut… Here’s hoping Watkins will continue to delve
into Nevada’s unsound caverns and emerge with such worthy plunder.”
–Dallas Morning News
“Gloriously vivid stories about the human heart.” –Kirkus
“In her debut short story collection Battleborn Claire Vaye Watkins
marries character to landscape as well as anyone I have read in
years. These stories set in the Nevada desert are gritty and
brilliant, and foretell an auspicious literary future for their
author.” –Largehearted Boy
"A coolly impressive new voice of the American West." –The
Financial Times
"The people in Battleborn… aren’t characters in stories, but human
beings perpetually yearning for warmth… Entering the varied lives
is akin to watching a tightrope walker high overhead, moving with
steady confidence without a net… Watkins writes with precision and
care, the sentences themselves as surprising as the events, the
dialogue, and the spare description… There is a purity to the prose
that is a constant pleasure to read… There is great originality in
these narratives… But the generosity and personal sacrifices of the
people are as universal as the stars at night." –Chris Offutt,
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Readers... will find much to admire in this arresting collection,
which one hopes is merely the first stop along the way for a writer
who deserves a sustained literary life." –Library Journal (starred
review) “A fresh, fierce, fabulous collection. Watkins writes
like the divine Didion—cool and clean with not a word wasted.
Where’d she come from? I’m glad she’s here.” –Joy Williams, author
of The Quick and The Dead
“Claire Vaye Watkins is never, ever satisfied with the ordinary.
Each story in this brilliant debut surprises. Watkins offers us
amazing visions of a funny, savage, haunted West-and one of the
most outstanding short story collections in recent memory.”
–Christopher Coake, author of We’re in Trouble and You Came Back
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
