“Bell deftly moves from retelling fairy tales to crafting her own brand of gritty realism. . . . She also successfully dabbles in satire. Her title story is a genre-defying list of the many ills of our modern world, including, on the fashion front, the return of the cowl neck as a sure sign of societal collapse. This biting humor exists alongside tender moments such as a father learning how to tell a bedtime story. With her mix of dark and light, lovable and unlikable characters, and hope and regret, Bell’s collection is part Neil Gaiman and part Donald Barthelme, with a touch of Joyce Carol Oates.”

—BOOKLIST, starred review

“Bell knows American women and men, and she knows her way around the American language, from its jazzy and cornucopial top to its dank bump-and-grind bottom. It seems there’s nothing that Heidi Bell can’t do, with her earthy wit and cunning imagination, encyclopedic resources of language, and deft mastery of literary forms. . . . A golden thread of magic, shape-shifting, and light along the edges is also at play in these stories, often allowing a glimpse of another world altogether, the richer universe where stories are born.”

—JAIMY GORDON, author of Lord of Misrule, winner of the National Book Award

“An exquisite, achingly rendered collection of stories. Heidi Bell’s recipe is part fairy tale, part biting social commentary—hopelessly romantic with a sharp edge. Though the book is raucously funny, Bell knows how difficult life is—and how incompetent most decent people feel as they navigate it—and she pushes her characters to their limits, because the way through is the hard way.”

—BONNIE JO CAMPBELL, author of The Waters and American Salvage, finalist for the National Book Award

“Heidi Bell is one of our great unsung writers. Let these stories sing to you. Listen to their music and you will fall under the spell as I did.”

—MATTHEW SALESSES, author of The Sense of Wonder

“A fierce and funny collection from a highly original and enchanting sensibility. Bell’s stories X-ray our psyches in the way fairy tales do—revealing essential motivations while also shining a brilliant light on the marvelous, the disturbing, the uncanny. Her hardscrabble women and broken men fight on, often despite having one hand tied behind their backs by wrenching backstories. Beauty and yearning blend with terror and depravity in these artfully written pages.”

—ANDY MOZINA, author of Tandem