Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Battleborn and a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” fiction writer, as well as the recipient of the Story Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Tin House, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the Southwest 2013, and elsewhere. “Wasteland, Wasteland, Wasteland” is an excerpt from her novel, Gold Fame Citrus, out September 29 from Riverhead Books. An assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Watkins has also taught at Bucknell and Princeton, and she and her husband, the writer Derek Palacio, are codirectors of the Mojave School, a creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.
Spring 2013
Wasteland, Wasteland, Wasteland
The binder does not say “mole men.” The mole men are a rumor, a legend. So the old, empinkened blind man with the puckered skin and long, translucent, prehensile whiskers […]