“One should not pick favorites, but I’ll say it anyway; Cara Hoffman is my favorite living American writer. In her latest work, RUIN, each story is a wild universe driven by its own purpose, filled with terrifying elegance and ecstatic harm. I never wonder why what she’s telling me matters. Brilliant and anti-redemptive, she traces the desire of her characters with surgical dexterity, each red line exposing life.”
—Vanessa Veselka, author of the National Book Award–nominated The Great Offshore Grounds
“These arresting, disorienting stories demand attention. Images of disorder are juxtaposed with poetic descriptions of nature, as of blossoms pooling in “gutters already white with ash;” here, art has the power to create and preserve matter. In the radiant, brooding stories of Cara Hoffman’s collection, art and nature are sources of refuge in a tumultuous, uncertain world.”
— Foreword (Starred Review)
“Hoffman writes with a restraint that makes poetry of pain.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Tough, scarred, feral and sexy. The book and the characters refuse to conform and like in all good outlaw literature [Hoffman] takes sharp aim at the contemporary culture’s willingness to do so.”
—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
“Hoffman maps the atmosphere of paranoia that descends on a formerly tranquil town as she moves deftly between its inhabitants.”
—The New Yorker
“Hoffman writes like a dream—a disturbing, emotionally charged dream that resolves into a surprisingly satisfying and redemptive vision.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Mesmerizing.”
—New Orleans Times Picayune
"A fearless storyteller with great insight."
—Bill Wolfe, Read Her Like an Open Book
“The stories of RUIN deftly display the horror and ugliness of our culture of violence and consumption, yet also reveal the delicate humanity within our collective yearning. Reading Cara Hoffman’s fiction makes me not only want to write better, but to be better.”
—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
“RUIN is a collection of ten jewels, each multi-faceted and glittering, to be experienced with awe and joy. Cara Hoffman has seen a secret world right next to our own, just around the corner, and written us a field guide to what she’s found. I love this book.”
—Sara Gran, author of Infinite Blacktop and Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead
“Cara Hoffman’s short fiction is as tense and rich with the opaque and the precise as a painting by Leonora Carrington.”
—Molly Tanzer, author of Vermilion and Creatures of Will and Temper
“If there is such a thing as ‘anarchist fiction,’ it must be fiction that breaks all the rules of time and space, of realism and the fantastic, of fact and feelings. RUIN is true, exciting, anarchist fiction.”
—Nick Mamatas, author of The People’s Republic of Everything and The Second Shooter
“RUIN, like all the best story collections, is a glittering, abstract mosaic. From the uneasy fairy-tale rhythms of “They” to the gritty, reality-shattering “The Paragrapher” to the smooth, bitter drink that is “Childhood,” each of these stories showcases a different aspect of Hoffman’s razor-sharp talent—but they all demand that we confront hard truths and self-delusions. A treat for both fans of her novels and aficionados of the short story as an art form.”
—Carrie Laben, author of A Hawk in the Woods
