Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781948226011

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Reviews

Praise for Northwood With all the precision, concision, and mystery of an essential Grimms' fairy tale, the stunning passages in Mayrse Meijer's Northwood lure us down wooded paths where woodcutter, bear, fox, moth, and lover allure and menace.The woman inside these pages draws a world as inevitable, endangered, and necessary as any Gretel or Snow White. Count me a fan of this original writer. --Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything and Make Me Do Things Praise for Heartbreaker Chicago Review of Books Best Fiction Books of 2016 Electric Literature 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016 Largehearted Boy's Favorite Short Story Collections of 2016 Meijer's stories are intense and threatening, with language that invigorates the senses. Like the writers of her ilkâ [Lindsay] Hunter, Amelia Gray, Laura van den Berg--Meijer makes the dangers of girlhood come alive, crafting characters who flirt with violence. â Maddie Crum, Huffington Post [Meijer] reaches into the darkest parts of the human psyche where sexuality, vulnerability, and violence commingle and simmer . . . Beneath these incendiary premises, the characters' relationships engender genuine empathy; Meijer is extraordinarily adept at tapping into a well of existential loneliness brought on by civilization's tendency and shame. --Publishers Weekly Meijer's unerring knack for finding the pure shape of a story--for lining up the component images and complications in the just the right order--marks her as something quite rare. Her stories captivate in the way that urban legends do, splicing the sensational into the fearfully mundane. Even as they subvert the expectations of various relationships, the stories don't feel new. They feel lived in, re-discovered, like old stories being told for the first time in a long time. --Michael Deagler, The Rumpus The edgy stories in Meijer's debut collection cut like so many wild teeth: sharp, deep, and unforgiving . . . Meijer breaks open taboos about sex, disability, melancholy, and violence with the careful precision of a teenager egging the house of her mortal enemy. Here is all the raw anger, fear, malice, lust, and confusion of women used to threats, stalking, and ceaseless observation, who live with their lives hanging every day in the balance. In fiction, Meijer seems to say, they have a shot at making their own rules--and the results are strange, unsettling, and addictive . . . In deft, clear prose, Meijer takes everyday moments of loss and loneliness and threads them through with elements of the gothic, fantasy, and fairy tale . . . Taut and ruthless, Meijer's tales somehow manage to be both believable in their strangeness and recognizable in their pointed cruelties. Here are the misfits, the overweight, and the lonely. The obsessives and the broken. Here are the monstersâ and they look an awful lot like you. A dark and surprising new voice in short fiction. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The characters in Meijer's debut collection of short stories are defined by their obsessions and are brought to life in quick, deft strokes. To enter their lives, however briefly, is to enter a warped world in which convention is upended and consequences only implied. Meijer's writing is arresting and disturbing, burning with clarity at even the most complex moments . . . The sharpness with which these people are drawn, largely without context beyond the immediate situation, only reinforces the strangeness of the tales they inhabit, and leaves the reader with burning questions unanswered. --Bridget Thoreson, Booklist This blurred line between animal and woman, and the notion that these hybrid women cannot and will not be domesticated, runs through every story in Heartbreaker. Yet each iteration feels freshly uncomfortable, each rabid girl uniquely resistant to laws of man or nature that might bind them. So untethered are these girls and women that the stories more often than not occupy a surreal space between reality and fable. But forget the kind of magical realism that plays heavy with sentimentality or sweetness; any magic in a Meijer story serves only to reveal its raw, ugly underbelly . . . The stories in this collection are as frank and strange and unpredictable as the girls and women they are about. The writing, never indulgent, takes sharp turns and steep drops, with flashes of Joy Williams and Eudora Welty in its unapologetic nakedness. --Aja Gabel, Southern Humanities Review The thirteen stories in Maryse Meijer's Heartbreaker are defiant to their type and bold within their bounds. They thrust themselves onto your lap and stay on your mind for days . . . Meijer writes with the controlled restraint of an explosives expert wiring a building for collapse. Reading her work is like taking a seat in that abandoned place and listening to the eerie shifting sounds. Soon enough, the whole thing will come down around you. --Amelia Gray, Electric Literature Maryse Meijer has written a scowl of a book, a gleaming hungry mouth, a chomp. You feel lucky to get out alive, and then you just feel lucky. There you are, missing the danger, longing again for its toothed beauty. Heartbreaker is a bright and dark joy. -- Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls The finely etched stories of Heartbreaker are glorious with menace and mystery. Maryse Meijer writes straight into the fire to retrieve the violent ache, the insatiable desire, the trembling love at its hot, hot center. These are terrifying, surprising, beautiful stories, for which I couldn't be more grateful. --Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away

Praise for Northwood With all the precision, concision, and mystery of an essential Grimms' fairy tale, the stunning passages in Mayrse Meijer's Northwood lure us down wooded paths where woodcutter, bear, fox, moth, and lover allure and menace.The woman inside these pages draws a world as inevitable, endangered, and necessary as any Gretel or Snow White. Count me a fan of this original writer. --Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything and Make Me Do Things Praise for Heartbreaker Chicago Review of Books Best Fiction Books of 2016 Electric Literature 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016 Largehearted Boy's Favorite Short Story Collections of 2016 Meijer's stories are intense and threatening, with language that invigorates the senses. Like the writers of her ilkâ [Lindsay] Hunter, Amelia Gray, Laura van den Bergâ Meijer makes the dangers of girlhood come alive, crafting characters who flirt with violence. â Maddie Crum, Huffington Post [Meijer] reaches into the darkest parts of the human psyche where sexuality, vulnerability, and violence commingle and simmer . . . Beneath these incendiary premises, the characters' relationships engender genuine empathy; Meijer is extraordinarily adept at tapping into a well of existential loneliness brought on by civilization's tendency and shame. â Publishers Weekly Meijer's unerring knack for finding the pure shape of a storyâ for lining up the component images and complications in the just the right orderâ marks her as something quite rare. Her stories captivate in the way that urban legends do, splicing the sensational into the fearfully mundane. Even as they subvert the expectations of various relationships, the stories don't feel new. They feel lived in, re-discovered, like old stories being told for the first time in a long time. â Michael Deagler, The Rumpus The edgy stories in Meijer's debut collection cut like so many wild teeth: sharp, deep, and unforgiving . . . Meijer breaks open taboos about sex, disability, melancholy, and violence with the careful precision of a teenager egging the house of her mortal enemy. Here is all the raw anger, fear, malice, lust, and confusion of women used to threats, stalking, and ceaseless observation, who live with their lives hanging every day in the balance. In fiction, Meijer seems to say, they have a shot at making their own rulesâ and the results are strange, unsettling, and addictive . . . In deft, clear prose, Meijer takes everyday moments of loss and loneliness and threads them through with elements of the gothic, fantasy, and fairy tale . . . Taut and ruthless, Meijer's tales somehow manage to be both believable in their strangeness and recognizable in their pointed cruelties. Here are the misfits, the overweight, and the lonely. The obsessives and the broken. Here are the monstersâ and they look an awful lot like you. A dark and surprising new voice in short fiction. â Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The characters in Meijer's debut collection of short stories are defined by their obsessions and are brought to life in quick, deft strokes. To enter their lives, however briefly, is to enter a warped world in which convention is upended and consequences only implied. Meijer's writing is arresting and disturbing, burning with clarity at even the most complex moments . . . The sharpness with which these people are drawn, largely without context beyond the immediate situation, only reinforces the strangeness of the tales they inhabit, and leaves the reader with burning questions unanswered. â Bridget Thoreson, Booklist This blurred line between animal and woman, and the notion that these hybrid women cannot and will not be domesticated, runs through every story in Heartbreaker. Yet each iteration feels freshly uncomfortable, each rabid girl uniquely resistant to laws of man or nature that might bind them. So untethered are these girls and women that the stories more often than not occupy a surreal space between reality and fable. But forget the kind of magical realism that plays heavy with sentimentality or sweetness; any magic in a Meijer story serves only to reveal its raw, ugly underbelly . . . The stories in this collection are as frank and strange and unpredictable as the girls and women they are about. The writing, never indulgent, takes sharp turns and steep drops, with flashes of Joy Williams and Eudora Welty in its unapologetic nakedness. â Aja Gabel, Southern Humanities Review The thirteen stories in Maryse Meijer's Heartbreaker are defiant to their type and bold within their bounds. They thrust themselves onto your lap and stay on your mind for days . . . Meijer writes with the controlled restraint of an explosives expert wiring a building for collapse. Reading her work is like taking a seat in that abandoned place and listening to the eerie shifting sounds. Soon enough, the whole thing will come down around you. â Amelia Gray, Electric Literature Maryse Meijer has written a scowl of a book, a gleaming hungry mouth, a chomp. You feel lucky to get out alive, and then you just feel lucky. There you are, missing the danger, longing again for its toothed beauty. Heartbreaker is a bright and dark joy. â Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls The finely etched stories of Heartbreaker are glorious with menace and mystery. Maryse Meijer writes straight into the fire to retrieve the violent ache, the insatiable desire, the trembling love at its hot, hot center. These are terrifying, surprising, beautiful stories, for which I couldn't be more grateful. â Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away

Author Information

Maryse Meijer is the author of Heartbreaker. She lives in Chicago.

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