About the Book
Lyrics for Rock Stars is a collection of seventeen stories―some historical, some contemporary- all set in the West. Involving skiers, ranchers, cyclists, suffragettes, tourists, super models, dead pigs, burro racers, religious beet farmers, immigrant miners, scorned lovers, penitent centenarians, and musicians, they are as varied as the region's landscape. Some involve kids surviving the choices of the adults around them. Some involve those adults. Three of the stories are humorous. In one story, a fourteen-year-old girl's sexual awakening takes form in a crush on an older cowboy as she starts to understand her parents' rocky history. In another, an eight-year-old girl is forced to comfort her pregnant mother on the night her father has left for another woman. In the title story, a very pregnant gold-digger understands the error of her ways and, spurred by a meeting with a singing hippie, tries to start a new life. All of the stories explore how society's values clash with our individual desires, and the ways we weave our lives through these opposing forces, often creating not of a lifeline, but a noose.
About the Author :
Heather Mateus Sappenfield's writing explores the adventures that fill life, often in the Rocky Mountain landscape that has been her lifelong home. She's fascinated by the many selves each of us becomes in our varied roles throughout the day (some we like, some we do not), and her writing often delves into the internal adventure of juggling those multiple selves. Among the recognitions she's received are the Danahy Fiction Prize, the Arthur Edelstein Prize, three Pushcart Prize nominations, and finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Kraken Prize, and the Colorado Book Awards.
Review :
"Wow! Lyrics for Rock Stars is a rousing literary adventure set in a brilliant Colorado landscape. The western men and women in these stories ski, bicycle, race with donkeys, work on ranches, taunt bears, and run away in search of wild horses or a kind word. And then there are the children of these distraught mothers and disappointing fathers. Sappenfield's courageous children will bring you to tears as they work their way through the messes the adults make. These vivid, muscular stories make me feel glad to be human."-Bonnie Jo Campbell, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalist
"Welcome to the beautiful state of Colorado. Meet its inhabitants. Visit all the most spectacular sites, and a few dark and scary ones too. In Lyrics for Rock Stars, Heather Mateus Sappenfield has drawn a map of Colorado and written a legend that describes the inner workings of its people's hearts."
-Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers, National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalist
"Stepping into the stories in Lyrics for Rock Stars is like stepping into lives you already know, people you've lived with, or if you don't know them already, you'll wish you did. Writing about the inhabitants of landscapes she knows by heart, Sappenfield makes her people come alive on the page and you'll turn each of those pages hoping for them, pulling for them, realizing, slowly, that their lives are our own. "
-Pete Fromm, A Job You Mostly Won't Know How to Do, Five-Time Winner of the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award
"An exploration of the inner lives of marriage and mountain towns, the stories in Lyrics for Rock Stars rise like the foothills to meet the peaks. From airport parking lots to high desert meadows, Sappenfield knows the modern West."
-Nicole Magistro, 2015 Kirkus Prize Fiction Judge
"['Indian Prayer' is] finely observed and painstakingly crafted in a way that reminds me of Thomas McGuane's 'A Prairie Girl' which recently appeared in the New Yorker-only I like 'Indian Prayer' better. Every element has been fitted in a way that rewards even an unpracticed eye turned to the hidden stitchery of fiction."
-The Review Review
"Short stories often get short thrift when it comes to critical and readerly attention, even though their short form means it is much harder to paint a convincing narrative. Heather Mateus Sappenfield manages it with Lyrics for Rock Stars...each story features a memorable Rocky mountains character who wrestles with a personal challenge. Some stories have a historical theme, some have contemporary settings, and their character are so diverse that I found it almost impossible to narrow the collection down to a favorite story. That Heather Mateus Sappenfield can write in so many registers...is a testament to her enormous capabilities as an author. - NetGalley Reviewer
