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Reviews

"This novel is singularly difficult to classify. Is it lesbian noir? Slapstick dystopia? Midwestern gothic? To say that it's all of the above is not to exhaust the list of genres Simo straddles and, maybe, invents.... What holds everything together is Simo's inventive and unapologetically irreverent voice... Original, profane, and discomfiting."
—Kirkus Reviews

"This is a book for those who desire a protagonist who will rough them up a bit...How many of us have befriended or slept with people who would be intolerable if they weren't so deliberate, informed, and droll? Heartland takes that sensation and plops it into the pre-apocalypse."
—Sarah Fonseca, Lambda Literary

"Simo's gift lies not only in keeping the reader invested in her narrator's detailed observances and wild tangents, but in her own total fearlessness as a writer... Simo didn't necessarily set out to create a likable character, but a complicated one whose brashness reminds us how our past can ultimately shape who we are and how we relate to the world around us. Heartland is an imperfect, yet pleasing cocktail that goes down unexpectedly smooth; it is truly unlike any novel I can think of, or imagine."
—Juan Vidal, NPR

"Eschewing labels and defying expectations, Simo slyly confronts race, sexuality, multigenerational duty, immigrant dislocation, and even dirty politics while spinning a bizarrely spectacular, outlandishly disorienting (not-)love-story of lost, searching souls."
—Terry Hong, Booklist

"Hilariously absurd and profane."
—N. K. Jemisin, The New York Times Book Review

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HEARTLAND

By Ana Simo

A word-drunk romp through an alternate, pre-apocalyptic America, Ana Simo's fiction debut turns the classic murder mystery on its head with the story of a thwarted author's elaborate revenge on the woman who stole her lover. Blending elements of telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire, Heartland is above all a hallucinatory indictment of racism, American style.

There's only one solution for a nasty case of writer's block, and that's murder. Specifically, that of one Mercy McCabe, a cunning art dealer who was once our Latina narrator's rival for the scrumptious Bebe. When she discovers McCabe not only stole her away, but squandered her affection, revenge is not enough. McCabe must admit her guilt, sentence herself, and beg for her execution—Soviet-style.

McCabe, though, is slippery. Lured to the house in the Great Plains where the parents of her would-be murderer had worked as domestics, she suddenly disappears. Worse, an old childhood friend unexpectedly arrives. And as a puritanical caliphate batters Constantinople with America in its sights, no one knows who will be against the wall first.

Heartland is a hilarious, genre-defying fiction debut that confronts race, assimilation, sexual mores, and taboos through a high-voltage tale of love, language, and revenge.

Book Details

Paperback List Price: $16.99 • ISBN: 9781632061508 • Publication: 1/16/2018 • 5.5" x 8.25" • 240 pages • Fiction — Lesbian Pulp Noir • Territory: World all Languages • eBook ISBN: 9781632061515

Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound