Holler, Child: Stories - Paperback

by Latoya Watkins (Author)

Longlisted for the National Book Award

Winner of the Reading the West Book Award in Fiction

Winner of the Writers' League of Texas Book Award in Fiction

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

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. 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.

Author Biography

LaToya Watkins's debut novel, Perish, was published to great acclaim in 2022. Her writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Sun, McSweeney's, and the Kenyon Review, among other publications. She has received grants, scholarships, and fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in a suburb of Dallas.