Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Fiction & Related items

DRIVING IN CARS WITH HOMELESS MEN

Kate Wisel

Award-winning story collection - Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence, set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston.

Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio apartment of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages. Homeless Men is the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure to succeed and fail again. Kate Wisel is a native of Boston. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications that include Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Tin House online, Redivider as winner of the Beacon Street prize, and on the Boston subway as winner of the "Poetry on the T" contest. Kate Wisel lives in Chicago.

Available products
Book Published 2019-10-01 by University of Pittsburgh Press

Comments

DRIVING IN CARS WITH HOMELESS MEN has been optioned in a tv deal, for a limited series, with Endeavor Content/Pearl Street Films (founded by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon; production company of award-winning Manchester by the Sea), with co-producer Julie Gardner of Bad Wolf (production company of the book-to-tv adaptations of A Discovery of Witches and His Dark Materials). Kate has been commissioned to write the screenplay herself.

Flitting across the gamut from somber to triumphant... Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a cross-sectional depiction of moving through and escaping from abusive relationships. Quietly powerful and timely, Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is both an ode to and a call to action for all affected by relational violence.

This debut collection of short stories traces the visible and more subtle scars of four women: Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat. What binds them above all else are their experiences of violence. Against the vivid backdrop of early 2010s Boston, their antics and heartbreaks are kept inside tiny apartments, spill onto the streets, and wander into dirty dive bars. It's Girls without all the privilege and a fictionalized version of Lisa Taddeo's Three Women (2019), if the three women were friends... this is fierce and emphatic.

An uncommon fearlessness--a precise confidence--propels every sentence. There is a cold bite to these stories. Stark humor that slaps and stings. Dangerous, diligent fun that cannot fill the void. The lives of the four young women at the center of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men are a web of doomed experiments that edify in ways that cannot quite be articulated--they register, profoundly, on a visceral level. Kate Wisel is an important new artist with a uniquely potent voice, and this debut is cause for celebration.

The way in which Wisel portrays multifaceted suffering in this searing drum of a book is more beautiful, strategic, and empowering than one may expect. Written in ferocious, cutting prose, this book is - as Frankie once described of Natalya - "a beauty so rough that it's pretty," and it is not one to be missed.

Kate Wisel's women think like razor blades. They talk tough and love tougher, except how they love each other which is pure and deep, and ought to be enough, except it isn't, ever. These women vibrate with life, with longing, with an urge toward self-annihilation, with hope.

Some of the most alive fictitious characters I've met in a long time. The reason the characters jump off the page is Wisel's language. Her prose pulsates with the stark rhythm of muscular poetry.

Enter Boston as it belongs to a tribe of young women hovering on the edge of disaster. Nothing is coming to save Serena, Frankie, Raffa and Natalya but themselves. And so we witness their tenacity and grit, their loss, their mapping of escape routes, and their surrenders to love, the cost of which is higher than you can imagine. These stories are visceral and intelligent, irreverent and tender. Kate Wisel writes with originality and ferocity of language, honoring both the power of transformation through pain and the live-or-die necessity of female friendships. This is a necessary book, and Wisel's voice is one of the fiercest I've ever read.

Author Kate Wisel was awarded the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize by the University of Pittsburgh Press for her striking, unflinchingly honest collection of stories about four women living on the edge in Boston and their friendship that sustains them through violent relationships, addictions, and times of desperation.

Unflinching in its portrayal of the violence visited upon her protagonists, Ms. Wisel's stories move back and forth in time to examine the difficulty of transcending one's history.

... a terrific debut. The writing is dense and beautiful, and the pacing is sharply self-awarejust when you think you've had too much of these young women's misery, some light and pleasure flares... although never too much, and never enough really. It's a rough ride, but a worthwhile one if you're up for it.

Wisel's prose is layered, rich, and sharp. The book isn't afraid to look directly at violence against women while avoiding the overly glossy sheen of a girl-power narrative. While these stories have grit and gravitas, they also leave room for buoyancy and joy. With Wisel in the driver's seat, the reader should happily buckle up and enjoy the ride.

You can hear the crackle of heat and the roar of a powerful fire burning through these pages. Young angry women, brokenhearted mothers, and men who are lost to themselves and others struggle in the world of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men. Close to the edge, fearful of love yet dying of longing, Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Natalya are vital and tender. Their stories are incandescent.

Library Journal named this a Best Book of 2019 and gave this starred review: "Impressive... Wisel's prose is strobelike, illuminating the gritty landscape with small, powerful details. This dynamic--and often harrowing--collection beautifully spotlights lives that are rough around the edges." Read more...

Gritty in the best sense. These stories offer up hard granules of truth about contemporary women contending with dispossession, oppression and violence. Read more...

Sharp and propulsive... These fierce, fiery Boston-set stories are jagged but never jaded. Wisel's characters possess a steely wisdom, the kind of smarts born out of bad nights and big hurts, a kind of knowing forged in pain and aimed, ultimately, toward generosity, humor, and love. Read more...

Kate Wisel is a fearless writer - with literary guts and a distinctive nitro style--and Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a remarkable debut. The gritty lyricism of her voice makes me think of punk rock and blown mufflers and creaky bedsprings flavored with cigarette ash, red bull-and-vodka, gum stuck to the bottom of a Doc Marten, a little bit of Denis Johnson mixed up with a Janis Joplin howl. Welcome her. I can't wait to see what she does next.

In this devastating collection, Wisel's people move through hallucinogenically dangerous landscapes, both physical and emotional, alternately finding and destroying themselves in pursuit of pleasures that are nearly indistinguishable from pain. But running through these breathless tragi-comic iterations of consumption--of drugs, booze, of love, of sex--is a deep vein of compassion, illuminating the dark, and deeply familiar, lives of these hungry Bostonians. A gritty, glittering, chemical delight told in scalpel-sharp prose, this is an astonishing debut from a fearless visionary with guts to spare.