Darla Lacy

Battleborn

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus Winner of the 2012 Story Prize 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 . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on – and reinvents – her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

She had been abandoned as a baby and now she was doing the abandoning. That house and family she left behind. Her guardian had died suddenly. It was grief that drove her away as a teen. At least that's what she told anyone who would ask. However, that wasn't the reason. She kept a secret locked up inside her never to resurface. Only one other person knew and she was going to keep it that way. Katrina told herself she would never return to that house, but after an intriguing phone call from the lawyer handling her guardian's estate she found herself facing her past and her fear. "No big deal" Katrina tells herself, she could handle anything. She didn't expect this small town lawyer to be a handsome, sea-eyed charmer with suspicion in his every action. Katrina ignores his strange ways until a phone call comes late one night and leaves her without a word. "Her body was found" Katrina's confidant says. That's impossible. It couldn't be "her body." Would her gruesome secret be revealed? What would keep her afloat? Could her salvation be the handsome so-called lawyer?

Darlock

The demon Darlock has finally escaped the Underworld, and the earth is more wonderful and complicated than he could have ever imagined. With the help of Gazna, a demon cursed to spend eternity as a crow, he begins to assimilate to the sprawling American city that he now calls home. But unbeknownst to him, the forces of the Underworld are actively pursuing him, and after committing the heinous crime of soul theft, the angels of heaven are now involved in the hunt. For the first time in his long life, Darlock finds love but also hate. He must decide carefully, as the choices he makes in his new life will either lead to good or evil and will ultimately decide the fate every soul on earth.