“Drunk ghosts, feral mothers…riveting obsessions and unbelongings and captivities—the fragmented texts in Beautiful, Violent Things seethe and grip and fluoresce without apology. In these eleven dispatches, Madeline Anthes carefully weaves desire and estrangement, reimagines power as a woman’s capacity for hollowing a man, the ability to deliver impossibilities from her misappropriated body. The speakers in this collection compose a primal song, reprise—with blood and feathers and new ferocity—the iconoclastic feminisms of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Anthes is alive on the page, a writer to watch.”
— Tara Stillions Whitehead, author of Blood Histories
"I know these stories by Madeline Anthes. You know them too. They are the stories we whisper to each other: Mother to daughter, sister to sister, friend to friend. They are the stories about the things we want, the things we need, the things that have broken us, the things that have tried to break us. Listen closely to the voices in these stories -- you will find someone you know in them. You might even find yourself. This is a powerful debut collection from a gifted writer. We are lucky to have it.” — Cathy Ulrich, author, Ghosts of You
“The narrators in Beautiful, Violent Things want powerfully. They want to be seen, want to be left alone, want to hold their baby, want to want to hold their baby—but more than anything, they want you to listen to their voices. To the way the words sound coming from their mouths in a cold and specific arrangement. I am Wendy, chrome sleek and velvet fast: breathing heat and running wild. They want you to hear what lies just behind their words: the impossible problem of desire. A problem Anthes has studied like a scholar. Let's listen to what she's found—all these alluring, dangerous voices calling out.” — Tyler Barton, author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum
“The stories in Beautiful, Violent Things are alive, visceral and raw, not just in the blunt emotional honesty of their narrators—women who know what they want, who feel the twisted pull of the lives they have and the ones they've given up to be mothers and lovers—but in the prose, so very warm with poetry and song. Anthes is a writer who understands how to make the quiet moments in life roar.” — Christopher Gonzalez, author of I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat