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The Rock Eaters: Stories Paperback – May 11, 2021
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What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart?
These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado's strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In one story, suburban families perform oblations to cattlelike angels who live on their roofs, believing that their "thoughts and prayers" will protect them from the world's violence. In another, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing and, with them, the essential rights that those appendages serve. "The Great Escape" tells of an old woman who hides away in her apartment, reliving the past among beautiful objects she's hoarded, refusing all visitors, until she disappears completely. In the title story, children begin to levitate, flying away from their parents and their home country, leading them to eat rocks in order to stay grounded.
With elements of science fiction and fantasy, fabulism and magical realism, Brenda Peynado uses her stories to reflect our flawed world, and the incredible, terrifying, and marvelous nature of humanity.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateMay 11, 2021
- Dimensions5.17 x 0.77 x 7.73 inches
- ISBN-100143135627
- ISBN-13978-0143135623
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
—The Washington Post
"A fabulist marvel...Rich, textured, and exciting."
—NPR
"Engaging and imaginative."
—The New York Times
"Each of Peynado's storis is finely formed as a diamond...Wily but throbbing with heart, they dart into unexpected crevices of human experience...They speak to our unkempt, scarred world, even as they reimagine it notjust once, but repeatedly."."
—The San Francisco Chronicle
"Genre-bending brilliance...Peynado's harnessing of the diasporic imagination establishes her as a true magician of the marvelous real."
—The Boston Globe
“Brenda Peynado’s The Rock Eaters only came out in 2021, but listening to it, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s been around long enough to be a modern magical realist classic…If you’re short on time, the collection’s title story, ‘The Rock Eaters,’ is a particularly sharp example of this, but between Peynado skill with a pen and the audiobook’s cast of talented and engagingly varied voices, you know I’m going to demand that you let the entire book wash over you. Let it wash over you!” —Paste
"Peynado probes the limits of reckoning with such dilemmas as otherness, loss, and love in her glorious debut, a collection of inventive and fabulist stories...These alluring stories make powerful use of their fantastical motifs, enhancing the realities of the characters’ lives. The author’s skillful storytelling soars."
—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review*
"What a smart and intriguing writer I've just 'discovered'--though from the impressive list of credits on the title page, I can see that others have been luckier, sooner. Brenda Peynado's The Rock Eaters is adazzle with alluring stories, flights of fancy that don't just dissolve into cleverness or parse the world neatly into cliche or categories. The stories help us think through situations all around us in "the real world" in new, captivating ways. What I most admire is the moral imagination of these stories, never nudging, never obvious, but subtle and unsettling. Peynado is a writer willing to cross literary borders: magical realism, fable, parable, fiction, nonfiction--she erases those limiting storytelling parameters and her stories soar."
—Julia Alvarez, author ofIn the Time of the Butterfliesand Afterlife
“A stunning debut collection comprised of provocative stories that are oddly healing and horizon-expanding. An exciting new voice.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author ofAnnihilation
"Superbly crafted...A sparkling, strange, and enthralling debut from a vivid new voice in contemporary fiction."
—Kirkus, *Starred Review*
"This book is a giant. What staggering reach and ambition Brenda Peynado's stories have: here are aliens, tortured superhumans, angels, sufferings literalized as stones, ritualized drownings, enchanted sleeps, the hauntings of home, all rendered with the kind of power that sweeps us effortlessly from exhilaration to despair and back again. The Rock Eaters is the work of an imagination that brooks no limits, that claims, masterfully, all territories as its own. I'm in awe of this book. It's one of the most thrilling debuts I've read in years."
—Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson
"I love Brenda Peynado's big, beautiful imagination and the way her stories open up whole universes of possibility in only a few vivid pages. She is a magical mindbender--in conversation with Karen Russell and Margaret Atwood--who helps us understand the troubling issues of our world through a speculative lens. The Rock Eaters will put a spell on you.”
—Benjamin Percy, author of Suicide Woods, Thrill Me, The Dark Net, and Red Moon
"This book. This beautiful, fierce, tender, aching, and glorious book. The Rock Eaters has the range, depth, art, and humanity that is short fiction at its peak. These are stories that demand you sit and breathe after finishing. From rocks that hold sorrow to hands and arms that stretch forever, Peynado's voice is singular. An extraordinary collection.”
—Erika Swyler, bestselling author of Light from Other Stars and The Book of Speculation
"The Rock Eaters is vicious and beautiful, full of characters who will refuse to leave you at peace. Both painfully realistic and mind-bendingly fantastical, these stories capture the sense of displacement that comes with recognizing who we really are. Read it now, and see for yourself."
—Annalee Newitz, author of The Future of Another Timeline and Four Lost Cities
"The Rock Eaters is a book of wonders-- of aliens and floating children and sorrows as heavy as stones, yes. But more than that, Peynado is a mischievous trickster, an elegant conjurer, and an unflinching surgeon of the human heart as she speaks to us of longing, and rage, and loss, and wanting with freshness and fervor. A tremendously smart book full of art, and full of playfulness too."
—CJ Hauser, author of Family of Origin
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Thoughts and Prayers
The morning before the school shooting passed like any other, all my neighbors out at dawn performing oblations to the angels on our roofs. Families clustered around the sidewalks, mist from our lawns swirling around our ankles, looking up at the angels' pale humanoid faces and downy bird bodies perched beside our chimneys. Our mothers beat their breasts, performing sorrow for the tragedies that always went on elsewhere in the world. Our parents yelled their usual "Thoughts and prayers! Thoughts and prayers!" toward the angels atop our roofs. As children, we were supposed to kneel in the moist grass and be quiet, in case the angels were ever to speak.
The angels, for the most part, barely noticed. They chewed their cud from the grasses and bugs they scavenged during the night and then shat runny white on our roofs, the shingles looking iced with snow despite the Florida heat. When I was in kindergarten, we'd thrown rocks at them to get their attention, but they'd just turned and resumed their silent watch over the neighborhood.
My parents began the ritual, already dressed in their work clothes, looking as polished as a photograph in front of our freshly painted stucco house. I was obedient in my stiff school clothes-my mother never allowed me to stumble outside in my pajamas like some of the other kids.
There was no greater argument in our house than when my mother thought I had done something unworthy of our angel.
Out of all the angels, ours was considered the most blessed of the neighborhood. When my parents came to this country after college, this house was the first one they looked at, and their immigration papers arrived miraculously within the week. While others searched for homes and jobs for months, my parents sailed into their new life, prayed gratefully to their new rooftop patron. When the economic downturn came and brought with it a plague of layoffs, my mother was able to keep her tech job, and my father flourished in a financial field that boomed in downturns ("Betting on failure," he called it). The hurricane tore apart most roofs in our Florida suburb, but not mine. Every day my mother returned to the house, pulling into our drive, she breathed a great sigh as she saw our angel perched beside our chimney: albino faced, sleek winged, dumb eyes that looked at nothing. At our basketball games the parents cheered for us, but it was known that the real game was played silently among the angels.
Across the street, my best friend Rima Patil's family kneeled in front of their ramshackle house, the embarrassment of the neighborhood: mold blooming on the stucco, brown waves along the roofline where the gutters and wooden fascia had fallen into disrepair, a bright blue tarp over the roof above Rima's room, where a hurricane had downed a tree, just barely missing their angel. The blue tarp rolled and snapped like a flag of shame.
Rima's family was known to have the worst angel on the block. Her dad was one of the first to get laid off, lose health insurance. Her older brother had developed schizophrenia and claimed that the angels gave him secret messages; the family didn't have the money for his medications. The bank had visited their house three times in the past month. When the hurricane hit, the oak tree in front of their yard not only punched a hole in the roof, but also fell onto the family car. The tarp they placed over it leaked mist and bugs and occasional angel guano. That they were the one Hindu family in a neighborhood of Latino Catholics was not lost on my mother, though the fact that they were even darker than the rest of us, my mother pretended not to notice. Rima was wild, a force of nature, and my mother was known to count this as one of Rima's mother's misfortunes. Nothing terrible had happened to Rima's sister, Shruti, yet-she was valedictorian, a national-prize cellist, who radiated beauty-but we were all waiting; there was a sense that she would not be spared. It was Shruti Rima got her strength from, though while Rima's came out in recklessness and force, all elbows and knees, her sister had merged it with a softness that came out in glory when she played music. I idolized Shruti for her ability to walk the line between strength and obedience, her ability to get away with doing what she wanted while still looking like a saint-unlike Rima, who fooled no one, and me, feeling caged and wanting desperately to do something unforgivable.
Rima winked at me and then resumed solemnity, leaning on her fists in their overgrown grass. Her long black braid flicked with the impatience of a cat's tail as she turned back, echoing how it often weaponized into a whip on the basketball court. Her sister, Shruti, inclined her head as if she were still at her cello, her own long black hair draping over one shoulder. I knew Shruti had woven Rima's braid, had raked her deft fingers through the silken mess, had crooned a Carnatic composition as she worked. For the moment, Rima's lanky brother, Rajiv, was quiet, his eyes sallow from sleeplessness, instead of having his usual energy. Their mother beat her chest with one hand and kept her other hand dug into Rajiv's elbow in case he started with one of his outbursts. Their father, still in his pajamas, gritted his teeth and barked, "Thoughts and prayers," like it was being dragged out of him. Back in Bengaluru, they'd had other words, other rituals, for the angels on their roofs.
The angels above us looked on into the distance, snapping their mouths to eat mosquitoes from the air.
How could I have known that this would be the last time I would see all of them together, that unlucky family? If I had known, what would I have done to protect them?
Sunrise bled hot over the roofs like a punctured yolk, another day given to us. Neighbors quieted and rose from kneeling on their lawns. Kids sprung up, suddenly released from piousness to get ready for school. I lunged for my backpack by the front door and dashed across the street.
Rima grinned in greeting, leaning against the crumbling stucco of their front stoop with a swagger. Behind a bush that had overgrown the half wall of their stoop, I showed Rima a tube of lipstick that I'd snatched from my mom, a cocoa pink. It wasn't Rima's style-she always went brazenly bare, glittering only with the sheen of sweat, though her parents forbade her nothing. But this small rebellion assuaged the hot throb in my chest.
"Yeah," she said. "Do it."
I painted my mouth jaggedly with the tube, my trembling excitement and the sharp line of my fear of my parents' no-makeup rule getting the best of me.
Shruti emerged from the house, backpack slung cleverly over one shoulder, her hair draped over the other. Shruti could wither anyone with a look, and her arm around your shoulder made you hum with joy. She clicked her tongue at me in pity, cupped my chin with cool fingers calloused by cello strings, dragged her fingernail along the edges of my lips to fix the colored mess.
Rajiv flung open the door, and he gave me a thumbs-up. His smile transformed his tiredness, and I noticed his bravery despite the voices that tormented him sometimes, despite what the angels told him. It was never good. The angels always said it wouldn't end well for him, but that for the rest of us there was still a chance. And yet he faced each new day with a bright smile. "Give 'em hell," he said now.
Surrounded by the bold three of them, I could pretend I was the fourth, fear of getting caught breaking the rules melting from me like candle wax.
"Stay good, kiddos," Shruti said, running a swipe of her hairbrush through her hair.
Rima rolled her eyes, any entreaties to behave sending her instead slingshotting off into trouble. "I'll race you, Paola."
Rima and I ran together to the bus stop, cutting through lawns, kicking up morning moths into a fraying cloud of white. She pulled ahead, her braid licking the air in front of me, and I followed after her, trying to close the gap. Shruti, Rajiv, and the other kids of the neighborhood streamed behind us, the daily pilgrimage. We had every reason to believe the day was bright ahead of us and we would survive it.
At school during recess, a boy on the basketball court got in front of us in a game of horse. "Wait your turn," I yelled, but that was as far as I let myself go. The boy turned around and said triumphantly as his wrist cocked and the ball swished into the net, "Go back to your country." Rage boiled in me. Rima grabbed his collar and flung him toward the back of the line. He tripped, spilled on the ground with his palms burned raw. Then Rima and the boy whirled in a fast-moving cluster as they fought on the court, him pulling her hair and her fingers around his ears, wrestling him to the floor. Police lights flailed once in the parking lot of the middle school. Two policewomen whispered to the teacher supervising recess, who turned pale and called for Rima. The boy, upset because he had always expected to have the right to call us whatever names he wanted, shook the hair out of his eyes and, stood up straight like he was innocent, and pointed at her. I thought the police were arresting Rima-for just being her fierce, untamable self. She'd been unlucky again, with her defective angel. I was afraid for her, and I knew horrible things could happen to people under police protection. I promised Rima that I would never leave her alone, that I would commit a crime just so they'd put me in jail with her, and I could be her witness if anything happened.
She laughed. "I'll be back before you know it." She squeezed my hand and let me go. She fixed her braid and walked toward the officers with a bounce. While I bucked the expectations that came with having a good angel, Rima owned that she had a bad one, wore her family's misfortunes with a grin that looked as dangerous as a lion's mouth. She made life bearable for me beyond my perfect handwriting, my straight As-life with her full of streaking across sidewalks and lawns like fireballs, secret desires whispered and let loose, the challenge in her eyes to reach for just a bit more than we were given. I knew that the only thing I ever did right was attaching myself to her, inviting her over even when my mother turned her nose up at their cursed family. When they led her away that afternoon, one of the officers putting a heavy hand on her shoulder, she didn't look back. I noticed, perplexed, that a few other kids were led away from their classrooms to the back of the patrol car.
After the end-of-school bell, my mother surprised me by being in the car line instead of having me get on the bus. I'd forgotten to wipe off the last of the lipstick from earlier, and my mother took a rough paper towel to my mouth. My lips stinging, rosaries swinging from the rearview mirror, my mother explained as she drove what had really happened:
Shruti had been in the high school music room. I imagined her curtain of hair swinging over her cello as she played. The arts magnate high school bused in musicians, painters, theater kids from across town, and Shruti was the only one from our neighborhood. It was study hall period for her, so there was no one else in the music room, and her continuous, transcendent playing must have covered the pops of gunfire, the gunman going classroom by classroom. After the boy-a white kid, someone Shruti had had no interest in going out with but who had never accepted "no" for an answer-left the music room, she was found slumped over her cello as if she'd given up on song. Fifteen other kids dead, twenty-eight injured. The boy, when he reached the end of the one long corridor, locked himself in the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and shot himself, sparing the hidden schoolmate who trembled over a toilet.
"So he's gone," my mother concluded. "And you're safe."
As we pulled into our driveway, my mother threw her eyes up to the roof where our angel was perched, as if not to anger its goodwill as she spoke. Across the street in Rima's house, their curtains were closed. Their minivan was gone. Their angel squatted between the chimney and the hurricane tarp, wings folded shut.
Rima's family didn't come home for hours, and I kept one eye on their empty driveway while I watched the news, looking for the Patils. I still couldnÕt believe it. Three shootings had happened across the country that day, but I only watched the coverage for Shruti's high school: cops swarming around the building, yellow police tape, reporters jamming microphones in the faces of kids who'd survived, shaken and sobbing. Someone's best friend, someone's boyfriend, someone's daughter. Someone saying the boy had given off all kinds of red flags. Someone else saying apologetically that he seemed like a really nice guy. I wanted to understand why that boy did it, incredulous that the balance Shruti had always walked between being good and being brave had betrayed her.
The news patched in an interview with a gun rights activist and then one with a member of the Mothers for the Sanctity of the World, who were still touring at the location of a two-days'-previous school shooting. The Mother focused on blessedness, on calling on the protection of the angels, and she punctuated her impassioned speech with a swing and rattle of small relics tied up her arm. She was full of prayers for the souls of the lost, but full, too, of threats for potential shooters. The Mothers, all of them white ladies, toured the country with their families, handing out guns, training, and T-shirts from their sponsors, staging armed marches protesting anyone who would stand against them, shooters and gun control pacifists alike. They were mothers of school shooting survivors, those lucky few children in the right classroom, who huddled behind the right desk, who asked for the bathroom pass at just the right time. In the background of the interview shot, their giant red tour bus grumbled its engine. They were heading to one of the new school shootings that had happened today, along with the Good Guys with Guns and the Innocents, what they called their husbands and children, their great pilgrimage through the year taking them from slaughter to slaughter.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books (May 11, 2021)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143135627
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143135623
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.17 x 0.77 x 7.73 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #459,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,212 in Short Stories Anthologies
- #10,354 in Short Stories (Books)
- #24,877 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Brenda Peynado's stories have won an O. Henry Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, a Vermont Studio Center Residency, and other prizes. Her work appears in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She teaches at the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. She is currently writing a novel about a girl who can see all possible futures trying to save her mother, a guerrilla fighter in the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2021Excellent and creative
- Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2022This is exactly the kind of thing I think about when I hear the phrase "literary speculative fiction"--even when the premises are fantastical, the communities in which they happen are complex and immersive. The author's ability to tunnel through improbable occurrences to the emotional core is what elevates these stories. They are engaging, engrossing, and immensely satisfying.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2021The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado is a new debut short story collection to put on your radar. The collections opens with a powerfully memorable story titled "Thoughts and Prayers", in which a young narrator describes the reverberating impacts of a school shooting on their community while the adults ineffectually repeat the mantra "thoughts and prayers" to appease the strange, birdlike angels that live atop the roofs of their houses.
Many of the stories here contain facets of fantasy, science fiction, or magical realism. In "The Stones of Sorrow Lake", rocks form on people's bodies when they experience sorrow, growing until they eventually drop from their hosts, leaving behind physical scars. "The Kite Maker" is an unconventional story of aliens arriving on our planet. "The Touches" imagines a world where disease has ravaged the real world and humans have retreated to the safe, clean virtual world of the internet. And in "The Dreamers", people stay continuously awake for as long as they can and fall into long, dreaming comas at the end of their lives.
The speculative elements to many of these stories add more complex dimensions through which Peynado addresses themes of racism, classism, immigration, and identity — although they sometimes felt a little too abstract, which I thought distracted from the story itself. Some of the strongest stories in the collection, "Yaiza", "The Great Escape", and my favorite, "We Work in Miraculous Cages", are the least speculative.
These 16 stories are all fairly short, comprising a book with less than 300 pages all told, and there are some that I would've loved to see Peynado expand on more. I sometimes felt that I didn't really get what a story was really about, or what the fantastical details were meant to represent, but each story is told in a mesmerizing tone that evokes strong moods and feelings. Peynado is a writer to watch for sure, and I will wait eagerly to see what she does next.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2022THE ROCK EATERS is an incredible and heartbreakingly magical collection. This doesn't read like a debut collection whatsoever: Brenda Peynado is a master of the short story. Stories like "Thoughts and Prayers," "The Great Escape," "What We Lost," "The Rock Eaters," and "The Radioactives," will stay with me forever.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2023The Rock Eaters: Stories by Brenda Peynado is a fascinating, strange, and compelling set of stories. Even the average tales in this collection are unusual and provocative. These strange tales ring true with today’s social issues and challenges. That said, these stories are inconsistent in quality. The very good ones are extremely accomplished, leaving the average ones looking very flat by comparison. The uneven reading is a disappointment.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2021This is a writer we're going to be hearing about for a long, long time. She tackles difficult topics head-on with courage and insight, all within a surreal world that allows her metaphors to soar to incredible heights. I am absolutely in love with her writing and the brilliant way her mind and heart work. I feel incredibly lucky that I got to have this book in my life.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2021These stories will pull the earth from beneath your feet and leave you tumbling, breathless in shock and wonder, through the sky.
Flying families, useless guardian angels, trauma that erupts in stony growths, alien kite flyers, and vicious, wounded girlhood. A suburban landscape dreamy and lush and strange as another planet.
Peynado is a spellbinder, her sentences weaving together like garlands of locks. Pick up this collection and fall under its mournful enchantment.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2022The book came damaged out of the package.
The book came damaged out of the package.
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