Cara Hoffman

Cara is a novelist, journalist and editor. She dropped out of high school and left the country; sleeping on beaches and working under the table in Europe and the Middle East. Back home she found a job delivering newspapers which led to work as a staff reporter covering environmental politics and crime. She has written for the New York Times, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Rolling Stone,The Daily Beast and is a founding editor of The Anarchist Review of Books.She lives in Exarchia with her partner, and edits books she loves for PM.  

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Praise

“Hoffman writes with a restraint that makes poetry of pain.”
—The New York Times Book Review

The stories in Ruin demonstrate Cara Hoffman’s brilliance as a writer: the lyricism with which she affords her prose; her unflinching determination to capture the depth of human emotion; and her unwavering commitment to not just show us the dark, but to then illuminate it. These ten stories will dazzle, surprise, inspire, and light a fire that I don’t think can ever be put out.    
—Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez

 “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.”
—Vanessa Veselka, author of the National Book Award–nominated The Great Offshore Grounds  

“Tough, scarred, feral and sexy. The book and the characters refuse to conform and like in all good outlaw literature [Hoffman] takes sharp aim at the contemporary culture’s willingness to do so.”
—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

“Hoffman maps the atmosphere of paranoia that descends on a formerly tranquil town as she moves deftly between its inhabitants.”
—The New Yorker

“Hoffman writes like a dream—a disturbing, emotionally charged dream that resolves into a surprisingly satisfying and redemptive vision.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Beneath the deceptive lyricism of her prose, Cara Hoffman has long shown a healthy fascination with upending the social order … Her observations have the keen immediacy of lived scenes, similar to drawings sketched from life.”
—Seattle Times

“Mesmerizing.”
—New Orleans Times Picayune

“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.”
—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World

“RUIN is a collection of ten jewels, each multi-faceted and glittering, 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.”
—Sara Gran, author of Infinite Blacktop and Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead

“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.”
—Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey

 “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.”
—Panagiotis Kechagias, author of Final Warning

 “Cara Hoffman’s short fiction is as tense and rich with the opaque and the precise as a painting by Leonora Carrington.”
—Molly Tanzer, author of Vermilion and Creatures of Will and Temper

“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.”
—Nick Mamatas, author of The People’s Republic of Everything and The Second Shooter

“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.”
—Carrie Laben, author of A Hawk in the Woods

“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.”
—John Zerzan, author of Elements of Refusal