Lyrics for Rock Stars

“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, owner of Bookworm of Edwards & 2015 judge for Kirkus Prize for Fiction.

"About the opening story: "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.

“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. Sappenfield’s courageous children will bring you to tears as they work their way through the messes adults make for them. These vivid, muscular stories make me feel glad to be human.”
— Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, National Book Awards & NBCC 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, author A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do, Five-Time Winner of the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award

"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 the Colorado mountains 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 and Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient

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