COWBOYS AND ANGELS

Set in the same fictional Central Valley town as Godshot, Chelsea Bieker's first story collection, Cowboys and Angels, will explore the stories of many of the characters readers will remember from her novel.

Florin, a teenage prostitute, supports her ex-beauty queen mother after she's been severely burned. A religious farmer attributes his dead crops as punishment from God for his infidelities. And a madam recounts the brutal disappearance of her mother after the case is reopened. While these tales are connected by a fierce devotion to the land, they also brim over with each character's mad desire for loveto salvage grace where they can find it, and at times, to sabotage it. Raw and unflinching, told in bright, snapping prose, both Godshot and Cowboys and Angels imagine a harsh gothic world of longing and abandonment under an unrelenting country sun. Early supporters include T. Kira Madden, Leni Zummas, Rachel Kushner, Charles D'Ambrosio, Tom Bissell, Vanessa Vesselka, Teddy Wayne, Leah Dieterich, and Mary Rechner. Chelsea Bieker received her MFA from Portland State University and is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming, in McSweeney's, Catapult, Joyland, and elsewhere. Godshot is her first novel.