Maryse Meijer Libri

From the author of Heartbreaker, a disquieting collection tracing the destructive consequences of the desire for connection.

In her debut story collection Heartbreaker , Maryse Meijer peels back the crust of normalcy and convention, unmasking the fury and violence we are willing to inflict in the name of love and loneliness. Her characters are a strange ensemble―a feral child, a girl raised from the dead, a possible pedophile―who share in vulnerability and heartache, but maintain an unremitting will to survive. Meijer deals in desire and sex, femininity and masculinity, family and girlhood, crafting a landscape of appetites threatening to self-destruct. In beautifully restrained and exacting prose, she sets the marginalized free to roam her pages and burn our assumptions to the ground.

"Artfully explores themes of pain, desire, and the meeting place of the two, for a surreal, fairytale–esque accounting of what happens when we go to the darkest places within ourselves, and within others.” —NYLON Part fairy tale, part horror story, Northwood is a genre–breaking novella told in short, brilliant, beautifully strange passages. The narrator, a young woman, has fled to the forest to pursue her artwork in isolation. While there, she falls in love with a married man she meets at a country dance. The man is violent, their affair even more so. As she struggles to free herself, she questions the difference between desire and obsession—and the brutal nature of intimacy. Packaged with a cover and end papers by famed English artist Rufus Newell and inventive, white–on–black text treatments by award–winning designer Jonathan Yamakami, Northwood is a work of art as well as a literary marvel.

Featuring eleven imaginative stories, this collection showcases unique narratives that blend absurdity with dark humor. Among the highlights are a woman's whimsical romance with a giant banana and a tiny goat's unusual home in a woman's heart. The diverse voices of the authors create a captivating experience, inviting readers to explore bizarre scenarios and inventive language that challenge conventional storytelling.