Holler, Child

Longlist, National Book Awards 2023 for Fiction

ISBN 9780593185940
Tiny Reparations Books / Penguin Random House
author photo of LaToya Watkins. (Photo credit: Chanel Mitchell)
LaToya Watkins

LaToya Watkins’s writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Sun, McSweeney’s, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2015), and elsewhere. She has received grants, scholarships, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and A Public Space. More about this author >

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From the publisher:

In Holler, Child‘s 11 brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something—hope, reconciliation, freedom.

In “Cutting Horse,” the appearance of a horse in a man’s suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police. In “Holler, Child,” a mother is forced into an impossible position when her son gets in a kind of trouble she knows too well from the other side. And “Time After” shows us the unshakable bonds of family as a sister journeys to find her estranged brother—the one who saved her many times over.

Throughout Holler, Child, we see love lost and gained, and grief turned to hope. Much like LaToya Watkins’s acclaimed debut novel, Perish, this collection peers deeply into lives of women and men experiencing intimate and magnificent reckonings—exploring how race, power, and inequality map on the individual, and demonstrating the mythic proportions of everyday life.

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