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About the Book

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 SoHo art dealer who was once our Latina narrator’s rival for the scrumptious Bebe. When she discovers that McCabe has squandered Bebe’s affections after stealing her away, revenge is not enough: McCabe must confess her guilt, sentence herself, and beg for her own execution, Soviet-style.

In the all-too-terrifyingly-familiar America of Heartland, the inconceivable has become ordinary: corruption and greed at the top have led to mass starvation in the heartland; hordes of refugees have escaped from resettlement camps and attack the cities; a puritanical Caliphate has toppled Constantinople, with America in its sights. Meanwhile, escaping her New York life in disguise, our heroine lures McCabe to her home turf: a hilltop house in the Great Plains where her parents worked as domestic servants. Her nemesis, though, is slippery, and McCabe disappears, threatening to ruin a homicidal masterplan so detailed as to be akin to love.  

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

Praise for Heartland

“Ana Simo's debut novel Heartland is at once manic, brash and unsettling. It's also nearly impossible to categorize without running the risk of coming up short. It straddles the line between pulp noir and slapstick; it carries the can't-look-away sensibility of a telenovela. Simo, a Cuba-born playwright who co-founded the first lesbian theater in New York, takes readers on an erratic—and sometimes erotic—journey through the mind of a jealous lover. What keeps you engaged throughout is Simo's darkly funny and original voice…. Simo boldly tackles issues of race, sexuality, and immigration. It's an engrossing tale, to be sure—one with traces of surreal horror. 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…. [A] pleasing cocktail that goes down unexpectedly smooth; it is truly unlike any novel I can think of, or imagine.”

—Juan Vidal, NPR Books

“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

“Although the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing went to Deepak Unnikrishnan’s dazzling Temporary People (2017), the judges were so enthralled by the “insane and brilliant” Heartland by Cuban-born, New York-domiciled lesbian activist Simo that it, too, went to press, enabling the 73-year-old to enjoy her literary debut. At age 11, Heartland’s unnamed narrator wins a Blue Ribbon at the Elmira County Fair for writing ;an inadvertently anti-Semitic fable,' which condemns her to become a '[w]riting-made-me-want-to-puke' writer. While supporting her 'writing curse' with menial jobs and often masquerading as someone else, she falls for Bebe, the 'love of [her] loveless, licentious life.' Losing Bebe to Mercy McCabe sets the spurned narrator on a mission-to-kill, luring McCabe back to Elmira, where murderous intentions go awry, hindered by frostbitten limbs, disappearances, unreliable staff, an insatiable librarian, and a return of the dead. 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

“This seems like an wholly original novel. It is set in an alternate, pre-apocalyptic United States and promises to be a genre-bending high-octane debut.”

—Rabeea Saleem, Chicago Review of Books, The Most Anticipated Fiction Books of 2018

“Part telenovela, part pulp fiction, and part dystopian satire, Heartland is the debut novel from Lesbian Avengers cofounder Ana Simo about one writer’s revenge on the woman who stole her lover.”

—Carolyn Yates, Autostraddle, 65 Queer and Feminist Books to Read in Early 2018

“I was attracted by the cover of this book and then saw that the author mixes telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire in a novel about a writer seeking revenge in an alternate, pre-apocalyptic United States. My brain is ringing with excitement.”

—Jamie Canaves, BookRiot, Must-Read January New Releases

“This is where America seems to be heading even as we speak: corruption and greed at the top leads to mass starvation at the bottom; refugees fill camps across the country until they rise up and attack the cities; and new enemies abroad are rising up with America in their sights. Against this dramatic background we have the story of a writer whose solution to writer’s block is to commit murder. Only it’s not as simple as that: for the writer the plan would only be a success if the chosen victim admitted her guilt and begged for execution. But the victim is wilier than the writer supposes.”

—Paul Kincaid, BestScienceFictionBooks.com

About the Author

Ana Simo is the author of a dozen plays, a short feature film, and countless articles. A New Yorker most of her life, she was born and raised in Cuba. Forced to leave the island during the political/homophobic witch-hunts of the late 1960s, she first immigrated to France, where she studied with Roland Barthes and participated in early women’s and gay/lesbian rights groups. In New York next, she co-founded Medusa’s Revenge theatre, the direct action group the Lesbian Avengers, the national cable program Dyke TV, and the groundbreaking The Gully online magazine, offering queer views on everything. Heartland is her first novel.

BOOK DETAILS

Paperback: $17.99
ISBN: 9781632061508
eBook ISBN: 9781632061515
Publication date: Jan 16, 2018
5.5” x 8.25” • 240 pages
Fiction: Literary Dystopia / Lesbian Pulp Noir
Territory: World English

Books by Ana Simo