Often told in women’s voices, McConnell’s stories in this collection range in time from the 1930s to the Covid-19 pandemic and take place in a transatlantic world, ranging from Italy and Puerto Rico to California, New York City, and the American Midwest. While McConnell’s women sometimes find themselves through their lovers, they also strive for autonomy. They decide for themselves; whether or not they make the best decisions is another matter. Yet McConnell’s are not passive women. These are women with vocabulary, who know their minds, who live fearlessly, very much presuming—as the title suggests—that their hearts can take it. 

Whether it’s the only child of an Italian family to survive the pillage by the Nazis, or the painter eking a living in NYC in the Sixties, or the woman marrying later in life who makes a torturous excursion to a fertility clinic in West Germany at a time that’s clearly before the felling of the Wall, McConnell’s women are chasing down their lives. They are women on quests, in the thick of making their lives happen. 

In the collection’s first, masterful story, “Neighbors,” two women are living across a hall from each other and trying to pursue their art. Both Isabella and Viv are struggling after break-ups and finding solace with “sometime lovers.” While her neighbor has the benefit of wealthy parents, Isabella, the protagonist, must work to support herself. 

‘You’ll find another boyfriend,’ says the neighbor.

‘So will you,’ I say.

We both find sometime lovers.

‘Mine’s married….’

Isabella’s relationship to her painting seems in jeopardy, not only from the encroachments of her day job but also from her need to attend to Viv, whose mental health begins to spiral out of control. This story is gripping, both for Isabella’s struggle and the evocation of hard-luck times in New York City, not to mention the snap and crackle of McConnell’s prose. 

In a prize-winning story, titled “O. P. Climber,”a young girl on an Arkansas farm shows the first sign of resistance against her father as she defends a baby goat she’d personally raised (and named O. P. Climber), determined to keep it from being slaughtered. In another story, a woman who expects to lead what was once considered the “charmed life of a woman” does meet proper boy and eventually marries and has a child. More than once, the themes of art and sculpture come into play.

The thrill of the title story grows into suspense as a young couple navigates their relationship high on a Pacific cliff. “Kathleen,” he says. “Don’t take me away from the ocean.” His plea touches off an explosion within Kathleen: “No, no, she thought wildly. Keep me going up cliffs. Don’t let me kill you, too. I love you, I love you, I couldn’t bear to watch you die.” Hearing these thoughts “explode through some contained part of her head,” she “understood with certainty that they were the truth. She stood on tiptoes, pulling him to her, and rubbed her face against his firmly and gently as a mother passing her tongue over innocent fur. She knew then what she would do.”

This is a rich collection that, finally, is hard to categorize except for the thrill it gives the reader. Part II, aptly named “The Rag-and-Bone Shop,” alludes to Yeats’s line, closing one of his last poems, that sorrowfully speaks of waning inspiration. Interestingly, while this is the only part of the collection that’s given a title, it offers stories constructed in a meta-world of unnamed writers, readers, and editors identified merely by their roles. It’s significant that McConnell, herself the former fiction editor at Bellevue Literary Review, has played all these parts and knows them well—their power, their shadows, their ironies. 

While this is her first collection of stories, McConnell, who was a student of Kurt Vonnegut, co-authored a book with him on Vonnegut’s iconic approach to writing, titled Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style. The reader of these sixteen stories so full of humor and pathos—and so elegantly and meticulously written—will note that McConnell practices what she has preached. 

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Suzanne McConnell is a writer, editor, and educator. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in the Saint Ann’s Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Fiddlehead, and Poets & Writers, among others, and her work has been translated into Chinese, for the Yangtze River Series. Twice nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, McConnell has held writing residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. She taught writing and literature at Hunter College for thirty years and was the Scholar/Facilitator in Literature and Medicine at two New Jersey hospitals—the University of Medicine and Dentistry and the Department of Veteran Affairs. With Kurt Vonnegut, she is the co-author of Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style (Seven Stories Press, 2019). She holds a BA in sociology from the University of Arkansas and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 2006, she has been fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review. She and lives in New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

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Twice a Pushcart nominee, Geri Lipschultz has published in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., New York Times, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, and College English, among others. Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from Ohio University and currently teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She was awarded a CAPS grant from New York State for her fiction, and her one-woman show  Once Upon the Present Time was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. Her novel, Grace before the Fall, was published by Dark Winter Press in September 2025.