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The Rock Eaters: Stories Paperback – May 11, 2021

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 79 ratings

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A story collection, in the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, spanning worlds and dimensions, using strange and speculative elements to tackle issues ranging from class differences to immigration to first-generation experiences to xenophobia
 
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.
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From the Publisher

The Rock Eaters. The Trascending, Magical Debut Story Collection From Brenda Peynado

"A stunning debut collection comprised of provocative stories that are oddly healing."

"A genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that shines." - Washington Post

"I'm in awe of this book. It's one of the most thrilling debuts I've read in years." - Claire Beams

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that shines."
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

Brenda Peynado is a recovering computer security specialist who loves dog training, spooky beaches, tangerines, books, her little white terrier, and her author husband, Micah Dean Hicks. Her stories have appeared in over forty magazines and won an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Literary Award, selection for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Best Small Fictions, a Dana Award, a Fulbright grant to the Dominican Republic, and other awards. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. This is her first book.

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
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 79 ratings

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Brenda Peynado
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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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4.3 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2021
    Excellent and creative
  • Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2022
    This 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, 2021
    The 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.
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  • Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2022
    THE 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, 2023
    The 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, 2021
    This 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.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2021
    These 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.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2022
    The book came damaged out of the package.
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    1.0 out of 5 stars Damaged book
    Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2022
    The book came damaged out of the package.
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