“Radiant.... A source of refuge in a tumultuous and uncertain world.”
“One should not pick favorites, but I’ll say it anyway; Cara Hoffman is my favorite living American writer. In her latest work, RUIN, each story is a wild universe driven by its own purpose, filled with terrifying elegance and ecstatic harm. I never wonder why what she’s telling me matters. Brilliant and anti-redemptive, she traces the desire of her characters with surgical dexterity, each red line exposing life. ”
“Importantly, collapse here is only a beginning, not an ending. The escape routes Hoffman charts require an upending of certainties, an overturning of imagined roles. Ultimately, these stories are not so much about dystopias as they are about how we build new worlds and imagine alternatives. Even as we seem to be hearing an ever-louder drumbeat signaling our failures or savagery, Hoffman shows us that it is the relationships and alliances we form, and the love we defiantly put back into the world, that are the best, perhaps the only, path to building a better world. ”
“These arresting, disorienting stories demand attention. Images of disorder are juxtaposed with poetic descriptions of nature, as of blossoms pooling in “gutters already white with ash;” here, art has the power to create and preserve matter. In the radiant, brooding stories of Cara Hoffman’s collection, art and nature are sources of refuge in a tumultuous, uncertain world.”
“A collection of anarchistic stories from a founding editor of the Anarchist Review of Books and celebrated author of So Much Pretty, Be Safe I Love You and Running. American society is falling apart; Ruin is a look at what it may look like to survive the collapse, if survival was as surreal and funny as it was brutal. A little girl disguises herself as an old man, a dog begins to speak, separated lovers communicate across the penal colony via technical drawings. The New York Times Book Review has said Hoffman “writes with a restraint that makes poetry of pain,” and in Ruin both the pain and poetry are present in force. ”
“Those last years in the city, when people would pay for a human voice to put them to sleep at night, when people would pay for a human voice to tell them how to breathe, I was dying for a silence that was no longer possible. And not even the ghost of the landscape, the ghost of the neighborhood remained. ”
A little girl who disguises herself as an old man, an addict who collects dollhouse furniture, a crime reporter confronted by a talking dog, a painter trying to prove the non-existence of god, and lovers in a penal colony who communicate through technical drawings—these are just a few of the characters who live among the ruins. RUIN is both bracingly timely and eerily timeless in its examination of an American state in free-fall, unsparing in its disregard for broken institutions, while shining with compassion for all who are left their wake. Cara Hoffman’s short fictions are brutal, surreal, hilarious, and transgressive, celebrating the sharp beauty of outsiders and the infinitely creative ways humans muster psychic resistance under oppressive conditions. The ultimate effect of these ten interconnected stories is one of invigoration and a sense of possibilities—hope for a new world extracted from the rubble of the old.
“The stories of RUIN deftly display the horror and ugliness of our culture of violence and consumption, yet also reveal the delicate humanity within our collective yearning. Reading Cara Hoffman’s fiction makes me not only want to write better, but to be better.”
“RUIN is to be experienced with awe and joy. Cara Hoffman has seen a secret world right next to our own, just around the corner, and written us a field guide to what she’s found. I love this book.”
“Hoffman’s spare and delightfully strange stories are shot through with frequent flashes of sudden beauty. RUIN contains the seeds of her later award-winning fiction, along with her already fully formed voice. Each story in one way or another feels implicitly apocalyptic, in both senses of the word—the end of the world and unveiling.”
“Cara Hoffman’s short fiction is as tense and rich with the opaque and the precise as a painting by Leonora Carrington.”
“A gothic pastoral; a world of such beauty and menace that you scarcely recognize it as your own. Like Ambrose Bierce and Shirly Jackson, Hoffman has rediscovered America. Welcome Home.”
“RUIN, like all the best story collections, is a glittering, abstract mosaic. From the uneasy fairy-tale rhythms of “They” to the gritty, reality-shattering “The Paragrapher” to the smooth, bitter drink that is “Childhood,” each of these stories showcases a different aspect of Hoffman’s razor-sharp talent - but they all demand that we confront hard truths and self-delusions. A treat for both fans of her novels and aficionados of the short story as an art form.”
“If there is such a thing as ‘anarchist fiction,’ it must be fiction that breaks all the rules of time and space, of realism and the fantastic, of fact and feelings. RUIN is true, exciting, anarchist fiction.”
“In one of Schoenberg’s compositions is the very evocative line ‘I feel the wind of other planets.’ Cara Hoffman’s beautifully crafted stories bring that back to me. Tales of absence and possibility and other realms, rendered in unique voices. Haunting and excellent.”