Brenda Peynado’s stories have won an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Literary Award, selection for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Best Small Fictions, a Dana Award, a Fulbright grant to the Dominican Republic, and other awards. Her fiction appears in The Georgia Review, The Sun (London), The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and more than forty other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. This will be her first collection.
"A genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that
shines."
—The Washington Post
"A fabulist marvel...Rich, textured, and exciting."
—NPR
"Engaging and imaginative."
—The New York Times
"Each of Peynado's storis is finely formed as a diamond...Wily but
throbbing with heart, they dart into unexpected crevices of human
experience...They speak to our unkempt, scarred world, even as they
reimagine it notjust once, but repeatedly."."
—The San Francisco Chronicle
"Genre-bending brilliance...Peynado's harnessing of the diasporic
imagination establishes her as a true magician of the marvelous
real."
—The Boston Globe
“Brenda Peynado’s The Rock Eaters only came out in 2021, but
listening to it, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s been around
long enough to be a modern magical realist classic…If you’re short
on time, the collection’s title story, ‘The Rock Eaters,’ is a
particularly sharp example of this, but between Peynado skill with
a pen and the audiobook’s cast of talented and engagingly varied
voices, you know I’m going to demand that you let the entire book
wash over you. Let it wash over you!” —Paste
"Peynado probes the limits of reckoning with such dilemmas as
otherness, loss, and love in her glorious debut, a collection of
inventive and fabulist stories...These alluring stories make
powerful use of their fantastical motifs, enhancing the realities
of the characters’ lives. The author’s skillful storytelling
soars."
—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review*
"What a smart and intriguing writer I've just 'discovered'--though
from the impressive list of credits on the title page, I can see
that others have been luckier, sooner. Brenda Peynado's The
Rock Eaters is adazzle with alluring stories, flights of fancy that
don't just dissolve into cleverness or parse the world neatly into
cliche or categories. The stories help us think through
situations all around us in "the real world" in new, captivating
ways. What I most admire is the moral imagination of these
stories, never nudging, never obvious, but subtle and unsettling.
Peynado is a writer willing to cross literary borders: magical
realism, fable, parable, fiction, nonfiction--she erases those
limiting storytelling parameters and her stories soar."
—Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and
Afterlife
“A stunning debut collection comprised of provocative stories that
are oddly healing and horizon-expanding. An exciting new
voice.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of
Annihilation
"Superbly crafted...A sparkling, strange, and enthralling debut
from a vivid new voice in contemporary fiction."
—Kirkus, *Starred Review*
"This book is a giant. What staggering reach and ambition Brenda
Peynado's stories have: here are aliens, tortured superhumans,
angels, sufferings literalized as stones, ritualized drownings,
enchanted sleeps, the hauntings of home, all rendered with the kind
of power that sweeps us effortlessly from exhilaration to despair
and back again. The Rock Eaters is the work of an imagination that
brooks no limits, that claims, masterfully, all territories as its
own. I'm in awe of this book. It's one of the most thrilling debuts
I've read in years."
—Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson
"I love Brenda Peynado's big, beautiful imagination and the way her
stories open up whole universes of possibility in only a few vivid
pages. She is a magical mindbender--in conversation with Karen
Russell and Margaret Atwood--who helps us understand the troubling
issues of our world through a speculative lens.
The Rock Eaters will put a spell on you.”
—Benjamin Percy, author of Suicide Woods, Thrill Me, The Dark Net,
and Red Moon
"This book. This beautiful, fierce, tender, aching, and glorious
book. The Rock Eaters has the range, depth, art, and
humanity that is short fiction at its peak. These are stories that
demand you sit and breathe after finishing. From rocks that
hold sorrow to hands and arms that stretch forever, Peynado's
voice is singular. An extraordinary collection.”
—Erika Swyler, bestselling author of Light from Other Stars and The
Book of Speculation
"The Rock Eaters is vicious and beautiful, full of characters who
will refuse to leave you at peace. Both painfully realistic and
mind-bendingly fantastical, these stories capture the sense of
displacement that comes with recognizing who we really are. Read it
now, and see for yourself."
—Annalee Newitz, author of The Future of Another Timeline and
Four Lost Cities
"The Rock Eaters is a book of wonders-- of aliens and floating
children and sorrows as heavy as stones, yes. But more than that,
Peynado is a mischievous trickster, an elegant conjurer, and an
unflinching surgeon of the human heart as she speaks to us of
longing, and rage, and loss, and wanting with freshness and fervor.
A tremendously smart book full of art, and full of playfulness
too."
—CJ Hauser, author of Family of Origin
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