RaveThe MillionsIt isn’t a stretch to say that anyone familiar with the Manson Family legacy is also wondering how the daughter of Paul Watkins is doing. Battleborn is the answer to that question: she became a storyteller ... As if Watkins’ prose embodies the desert landscape of Nevada itself, the stories are stony, unkind, and harsh, though never unattractive. And as I read through the collection, I kept asking myself why I didn’t find her stories unattractive ... All of [Watkins\'] stories left me feeling purged and oddly cleansed, easily making Battleborn one of the strongest collections I’ve read in years.
Rachel Kushner
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksReno, the narrator of The Flamethrowers, is a protagonist who is memorable less for her observations than for her obsessions … Despite its premise, The Flamethrowers is not a love story. Nor is it really a novel about art. For Reno, love and art are vestigial of the deeper desire to transgress the unknowable, the unsaid, the limitless — to stand at the edge of fear … For Reno, her desire is as insatiable as it is irrepressible, and it’s when Kushner describes Reno’s fervor when the novel’s prose reaches its highest degree of erotic intensity … The Flamethrowers is essentially a feminist novel, more than it is a political novel, or a novel about art.
