Reviews
Praise for Battleborn : "Dazzling." - O, The Oprah Magazine "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 "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 "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, Praise for Gold Fame Citrus : "Exhilarating, upsetting, delirious, bold, Gold Fame Citrus is a head rush of a novel and establishes Claire Vaye Watkins as an important new voice in American literature." -Louise Erdrich "An extraordinary novel: relentlessly brilliant, utterly fearless, and often savagely funny. Watkins explores the maze of human thirst in all its forms. Here's a love story that tracks the mutating hopes of two lost souls, in prose that is fever-bright and ferociously assured, against the backdrop of the Great American Desert. More confirmation that Watkins is one of the brightest stars in our firmament." --Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia " Gold Fame Citrus is a sun-hammered fever dream, not unlike the shimmering, sweltering Southwest it depicts. Your heart will be wrung out by the journey of Luz, Raymond, and Ig. Your imagination will feast on the assured depiction of a near-future that is burnt to a crisp. And you'll hope it's all a mirage as Watkins renders a hot and very plausible future with the frightening force of a burning inevitability." --Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek Praise for Battleborn : "Dazzling." - O, The Oprah Magazine "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 "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 "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, Praise for Battleborn : "Dazzling." O, The Oprah Magazine "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 "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 "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