“A brilliant new voice in American fiction has arrived. Bright, sharp, startling, utterly distinctive, passionate, and secretive, Jamie Quatro’s stories are missives from deep within the landscape of American womanhood. They take you by the heart and throat, shake you awake, and ask you to ponder the mysteries of love, parenthood, and marriage. She has earned a place alongside Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, and Alice Munro.” —David Means

“Fasten your seat belt: Jamie Quatro is a writer of great talent who knows how to take a dark turn without ever tapping the brakes and then bring you back into daylight with breathtaking precision. These amazing stories explore the human boundaries between the physical world and the spiritual—lust, betrayal, and loss in perfect balance with love, redemption, and grace.” —Jill McCorkle

“These are stories that make you stop whatever you’re doing and read. They show us who we are at our better moments and those other moments too. These are delightful stories for this brand new century, from an author unafraid to face it. I salute a brilliant new American writer.” —Tom Franklin

“The characters in these absolutely unique stories live at a nearly intolerable level of intensity, stretched on a self-created rack between faith and sexuality—and they’re even smart enough to be conflicted about whether or not there’s a conflict. Jamie Quatro spares us neither the strangeness of their experience nor its discomfiting familiarity. She observes them with a cool, comic yet compassionate eye, and shapes the raw material of their passionate strivings with a steady, skillful hand—a miracle in which any reader can believe.” —David Gates

“Jamie Quatro's stories are about religion and children and sex and death and infidelity and God, and together they create one of the most authentically horrifying portraits of modern American adulthood I’ve ever read. Did I mention these stories are also very, very funny? Ladies and gentlemen, this is what short fiction is for.” —Tom Bissell

“Exquisitely crafted, the characters here are as complex, real, and finely drawn as you’ll find. No hyperbole here: Jamie Quatro is an outstanding new talent.” —Elizabeth Crane

“Quatro has mastered the art of the double take—that whiplash of recognition that gets the reader first at the level of the sentence, then, with extra reward, at story’s end. The author pushes fearlessly, cape close to horns, blade held high and at risky angles. An impressive debut.” —Sven Birkerts

“From under the placid surface of Quatro’s stories sentences of astonishing strangeness startle the pond and serve as reminders of the dangerous, unknowable human heart. . . . Here is a new talent with work made to last.” —Christine Schutt