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HOLLER, CHILD

LaToya Watkins

Stories

An extraordinary and unforgettable short story collection about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness - from a writer whose "spellbinding, buoyant" (Texas Monthly) storytelling will break your heart as it tends to the wounds.

In Holler, Child's eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something - hope, reconciliation, freedom. In "Cutting Horse," the appearance of a horse in a man's suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police. In "Holler, Child," a mother is forced into an impossible position when her son gets in a kind of trouble she knows too well from the other side. And "Time After" shows us the unshakable bonds of family as a sister journeys to find her estranged brother - the one who saved her many times over. Throughout Holler, Child, we see love lost and gained, and grief turned to hope. Much like LaToya Watkins's acclaimed debut novel, Perish, this collection peers deeply into lives of women and men experiencing intimate and magnificent reckonings - exploring how race, power, and inequality map on the individual, and demonstrating the mythic proportions of everyday life. LaToya Watkins' writing has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, The Sun, McSweeney's, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. She has received grants, scholarships, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and A Public Space (she was one of their 2018 Emerging Writers Fellows). She holds a PhD in Aesthetic Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas and is co-director of the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat.

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Book Published 2023-08-29 by Tiny Reparations

Comments

Every story, every character, every line of LaToya Watkins's Holler, Child is a revelation. But it's the devastating voices of her characters that linger most. I got lost, in a good way, in these pages, in the complex, intimate worlds Watkins conjures so beautifully. Alluring, intense, and utterly original, this collection is a treasure!

Holler, Child is an engrossing showcase of ordinary people struggling to get by, carefully and compactly drawn... Watkins's spare, evocative prose turns painful subject matter into thoughtful, transcendent art... an unforgettable collection. Read more...

Holler, Child forced me to stop everything I was doing and surrender to its stories - richly turbulent with faith, violence, sorrow, reckoning, and exquisite tenderness. LaToya Watkins weaves together character and place with a poetry that evokes Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. A heart-stopping collection.

Watkins portrays West Texas characters faced with loss, disappointment, and betrayal in this stunning collection... gut-wrenching... These kinetic stories are no less powerful than Watkins's marvelous debut novel.

Powerful... A Texas native herself, Latoya Watkins writes as though she understands the dangers of overdramatization and hyperbole for these Black Texas. Her stories feel rawer and more alive... There is no way one can be fully prepared to grasp all the fraught complexities, all the richness of character, all the rotting big dreams of the folks contained in these pages, but there was immense pleasure in trying.

Eleven searingly alive stories... emotional wallop... tour de force... Granular yet transcendent storytelling.

Latoya Watkins has surpassed the high bar set by her beautifully crushing debut novel... to form a profound collection... Holler, Child is an excellent collection with true staying power. Every single story could stand on its own but works beautifully toward the whole. Read more...

LaToya Watkins is a singular and fearless storyteller. She writes masterfully about moments of terrible, impossible choice, when everything that makes life worth living is on the line. These are intimate, richly textured portraits of West Texas life, full of longing and tenderness, inevitably tethered to betrayal and heartache. Every story in Holler, Child will confront you - heart, mind, and soul - and hold you, in its deep beauty. You won't be the same after reading this extraordinary book!

With her debut book Perish, LaToya Watkins proved herself to be a masterful novelist right out of the gate. Now, with Holler, Child, Watkins shows herself to be a master of the short story as well. Each of these gorgeous, note-perfect stories packs the full-bodied punch of a novel, but with an economy and compression that are nothing short of miraculous. How does she do it? I don't know, but what I do know is that I very much want her to keep doing it.

Watkins follows her debut novel, Perish (2022), with a collection of short stories that also focuses on the lasting effects of generational trauma on rural Black communities in East Texas. These tales explore fractured relationships between mothers and sons, couples grappling with the aftermath of infidelity, and children rejected by their families because of their choice of partner.... Recommend Watkins to fans of Brit Bennett, Angela Flournoy, and Lakeshia Carr.

Holler, Child is a triumph of storytelling. With compassion, urgency, and exhilarating craft, Watkins plunges headlong into the voices, hearts, and minds of these unforgettable characters. This collection is outstanding - fearless, timely, and beautifully layered.