The New York Times Book Review
Whether Watkins casts a backward glance…or a contemporaneous one…her vision is brutally unsentimental. Characters dig themselves into holes—literal or figurative—and are not explicitly rescued. If they survive it's by the same means as they've so far endured: stubbornness, luck and a slim strand of hope…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
Publishers Weekly
The people in Battleborn are wounded yet compassionate, despairing and lonely, but always open to a hug, a kiss, a way out, a way in, or a fleeting moment of companionship. These aren’t characters in stories, but human beings perpetually yearning for warmth. Fortunately, this book contains many stories because I read them for days. Claire Vaye Watkins has apparently sprung fully formed into the narrow pantheon of young writers willing to take narrative risks, eschewing trend and style for depth and wisdom. Entering the varied lives is akin to watching a tightrope walker high overhead, moving with steady confidence without a net. I found no missteps, no wobbles, no hesitations. As every story ended, I exhaled a long breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. Watkins writes with precision and care, the sentences themselves as surprising as the events, the dialogue, and the spare description. On a purely formal level, these stories shatter the forward motion of time. They move easily and readily from the present to the past and even to the near future. For lack of a better term, there is a purity to the prose that is a constant pleasure to read. Watkins makes beautiful art by embracing the rigors of the short story form, considered the most difficult in literature, then tossing out the rules and inventing some of her own. She blends history and fact with fiction to create a new mythology of the American West—the untold stories of people seeking connection with the past, the land, and each other. There is great originality in these narratives. I was deeply moved by the core of emotion within each story. The settings are fresh—desert, brothel, ghost town, casino, a series of letters. But the generosity and personal sacrifices of the people are as universal as the stars at night. Chris Offutt is the author, most recently, of No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. He lives in Mississippi.
From the Publisher
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
Library Journal
This debut collection takes its title from the author's home state, Nevada, so nicknamed because it achieved statehood during the Civil War. This setting, from Death Valley to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, from Virginia City to Las Vegas, is likely unfamiliar to most readers, and that strangeness adds to the collection's appeal. The stories cover a large chunk of history and a lot of ground, from the failed mining efforts of the forty-niners to Charles Manson's debauchery in his desert enclave (Watkins's father was a Manson associate) to the near-present with a legal brothel known as the Cherry Patch Ranch. The characters include small-town teenage girls looking for fun on a Vegas road trip (and instead finding danger) and a young Reno woman with a destructive streak who takes up smoking on the night she meets a man at a bar over a game of video poker. VERDICT Readers who have enjoyed the work of Annie Proulx and Joan Didion 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. [See Prepub Alert, 1/30/12.]—Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA
Kirkus Reviews
Ten stories, carefully and lovingly constructed, about Western characters as prickly as barbed wire. The epistolary story, "The Last Thing We Need," chronicles the letters of Thomas Grey to one Duane Moser after the correspondent finds a lost stash of prescriptions, a collection of letters and an abandoned '66 Chevelle out in the desert. "Rondine Al Nido" uncovers a young woman's secret shame. If there's an anomaly in the collection, it's "The Diggings," a story about the Gold Rush of 1849 and the madness of greed. It's a fine story but feels out of place among those that surround it. There are two here that are flat-out outstanding. "The Archivist" is a spare, unflinching story about the desolation of loss. "There was no salve for the space he left," is an amazing opening line for this heartbreaker about a woman building a shrine to the flimflam man she loved and lost. Watkins builds a fully formed world in "The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past," in which a beautiful young Italian boy wreaks emotional havoc on the workers of the brothel he stumbles into by accident. Gloriously vivid stories about the human heart.
