If You Think Your Heart Can Take It

"Exquisite stories of love and lust and the drive, above all, to connect. Suzanne McConnell is a master of precision. Her prose shines on the page, carrying the reader effortlessly into her characters' worlds. A luminous collection that gloriously pushes the boundaries of the form."

--Joan Leegant, author of Displaced Persons, winner of the New American Press Fiction Prize

These stories trace lives caught in transition and choice. Attentive to the forces that shape us-desire, regret, loyalty, hope- Suzanne McConnell pulls readers into moments of tension that make it impossible to turn away.

--Danielle Ofri, editor of Bellevue Literary Review, author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

"Suzanne McConnell writes about human entanglements with an unsparing eye and the way they actually happen-messily--and with a truth you feel in your gut. Her gaze is fearless. Her writing is brilliant."

--Dan Pope, author of Housebreaking

"The variety in Suzanne McConnell's stories is stunning. However colorful or exotic the setting, McConnell brings us to the abyss-of insanity, of unspeakable loss, or of an actual cliff over the Pacific Ocean. McConnell walks us along a tightrope, but she is effortlessly sure-footed-and seriously entertaining."

-Meredith Sue Willis, Author of Oradell at Sea and In the Mountains of America

When it comes to the daily assault of slings and arrows, Suzanne McConnell doesn't miss a thing. As one-a painter-puts it: "I paint fog. I am not interested in fog per se. What interests me is shape, shade, the distinct line between things and the lack of it." Don't miss reading these stories. Each is an alchemist's stone transforming the ordinariness of everyday life into literary truth and artistry.

-Pamela Ryder, Author of Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him: The Lives of Billy the Kid

Suzanne McConnell's award-winning stories have appeared in many literary magazines and twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer's Workshop where she received her MFA, and has published profiles of him, lectured on his work, and her book on his advice on writing, Pity the Reader: on Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell, has been translated into five languages. She taught writing at Hunter College for thirty years and served as a Fiction Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review for twenty. She lives in Manhattan and Wellfleet, MA, with her husband Gary Kuehn, a visual artist. www.suzannemcconnell.com