Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence. These linked stories are set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio apartment of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages. Homeless Men is the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure to succeed and fail again.

PRAISE

2019 Foreword INDIES finalist

Library Journal’s “Best Short Story Collections of 2019”

Entropy’s “Best Books of 2019”

Largehearted Boy’s “Favorite Story Collections of 2019”

Lit Hub’s “Best of the University Press”

Chicago Writer’s Association “Book of the Year” finalist

“These stories are electric. The women in these pages are tight rope walkers—completely present, precise, and full of grace despite wobbling over an abyss. I’ll now be a lifelong fan of Kate Wisel.” -Devin Murphy, judge

Gritty in the best sense. These stories offer up hard granules of truth about contemporary women contending with dispossession, oppression and violence…With a knowing and experienced eye, Wisel describes the down-and-out milieus of her protagonists in wry but never condescending detail. Scintillating and propulsive…each piece shines like a shard in the larger mosaic.

—Chicago Tribune

Impressive…Wisel’s prose is strobelike, illuminating the gritty landscape with small, powerful details. This dynamic--and often harrowing--collection beautifully spotlights lives that are rough around the edges; not standard fare but highly recommended.

—Library Journal (Starred Review)

Sharp and propulsive…These fierce, fiery Boston-set stories are jagged but never jaded. Wisel’s characters possess a steely wisdom, the kind of smarts born out of bad nights and big hurts, a kind of knowing forged in pain and aimed, ultimately, toward generosity, humor, and love. Wisel writes with a poet’s attention to cadence and precision of description. The city, and its people, live, breathe, and flame on the page.

—Boston Globe

Unflinching in its portrayal of the violence visited upon her protagonists, Ms. Wisel’s stories move back and forth in time to examine the difficulty of transcending one’s history ...the reader will need to piece the stories together both chronologically and narratively — but for the dedicated bibliophile, the effort is rewarded by Ms. Wisel’s preternatural understanding of the complicated nature of her heroines.

—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

This debut collection of short stories traces the visible and more subtle scars of four women: Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat. What binds them above all else are their experiences of violence. Against the vivid backdrop of early 2010s Boston, their antics and heartbreaks are kept inside tiny apartments, spill onto the streets, and wander into dirty dive bars. It’s GIRLS without all the privilege and a fictionalized version of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women(2019), if the three women were friends…this is fierce and emphatic. 

—Booklist

(A) TOUR de force debut collection…an unflinching, laser-focused portrayal of violence. Wisel deftly shifts between points of view and writes with verve, incisive detail, and a poet’s attention to tempo and cadence. Her protagonists, adrift yet assured, are fettered to one another by friendship, their ferocious hunger for human connection, their withstanding of abuse and its insidious violence, and their ever-present belief in possibility and redemption. Homeless Men invites readers to face the underbelly of human nature, our precariousness, and intermittent despair with determination, grit, and hard-won humor.

—World Literature Today

These stories are esoteric and familiar all at once…with stark honesty and razor-sharp detail…Wisel is playing a high-stakes game. Not just a collection about love and love lost, but the concerns of generational abuse, life-long dependencies, toxic-masculinity, and the loss of life itself. Wise-cracking, sharp, and cohesive…a masterclass of why story order matters…similar to a Raymond Carver collection. This collection has come at a time in which its characters will resonate with more of us than we know.

—American Book Review

Brilliant…beautiful and forceful…dense and exploratory…tragic and exhilarating by turn…Wisel’s stories really are that bright. Driving repays double for the attention it commands…and doesn’t aim for justice or redress. Rather, the collection demands to be heard on its own terms, adopting a telling that exceeds the usually allotted scraps of space and time left over by men. Wisel’s book so animates its foursome that I left individual stories and the collection as a whole desperate to know more.

—Gulf Coast

Flitting across the gamut from somber to triumphant… Homeless Men is a cross-sectional depiction of moving through and escaping from abusive relationships. Quietly powerful and timely, Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is both an ode to and a call to action for all affected by relational violence.

—Foreward Reviews

Wisel’s writing possesses a scorching and powerful energy … {her} characters are captivating in their authenticity.

—Newcity Lit

A landscape straight out of A Clockwork Orange. The twenty stories that make up Kate Wisel’s vivid, violent collection (winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize) focus kaleidoscopically on the lives of a group of four young women. One turmoil after the other has the mithridatic effect of inoculating them from defeat.

—Complusive Reader

You can hear the crackle of heat and the roar of a powerful fire burning through these pages. Young angry women, brokenhearted mothers, and men who are lost to themselves and others struggle in the world of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men. Close to the edge, fearful of love yet dying of longing, Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Natalya are vital and tender. Their stories are incandescent.

Min Jin Lee, 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize judge and author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award

Kate Wisel’s women think like razor blades. They talk tough and love tougher, except how they love each other which is pure and deep, and ought to be enough, except it isn’t, ever. These women vibrate with life, with longing, with an urge toward self-annihilation, with hope. Their hope will break your heart the hardest. Along with the sentences, which seem to be written by angels, razor-blade toting angels. This is one architecturally stunning, linguistically dazzling, hyper-intelligent, heart-expanding debut.

Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness; and Deep Creek: Finding Hope In the High Country

Kate Wisel is a fearless writer—with literary guts and a distinctive nitro style--and Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a remarkable debut. The gritty lyricism of her voice makes me think of punk rock and blown mufflers and creaky bedsprings flavored with cigarette ash, red bull-and-vodka, gum stuck to the bottom of a Doc Marten, a little bit of Denis Johnson mixed up with a Janis Joplin howl. Welcome her. I can't wait to see what she does next.

Benjamin Percy, author of The Dark Net; Thrill Me; Red Moon; and Refresh, Refresh

Enter Boston as it belongs to a tribe of young women hovering on the edge of disaster. Nothing is coming to save Serena, Frankie, Raffa and Natalya but themselves. And so we witness their tenacity and grit, their loss, their mapping of escape routes, and their surrenders to love, the cost of which is higher than you can imagine. These stories are visceral and intelligent, irreverent and tender. Kate Wisel writes with originality and ferocity of language, honoring both the power of transformation through pain and the live-or-die necessity of female friendships. This is a necessary book, and Wisel’s voice is one of the fiercest I’ve ever read.

  Lucy Tan, author of What We Were Promised

In this devastating collection, Wisel's people move through hallucinogenically dangerous landscapes, both physical and emotional, alternately finding and destroying themselves in pursuit of pleasures that are nearly indistinguishable from pain. But running through these breathless tragi-comic iterations of consumption--of drugs, booze, of love, of sex--is a deep vein of compassion, illuminating the dark, and deeply familiar, lives of these hungry Bostonians. A gritty, glittering, chemical delight told in scalpel-sharp prose, this is an astonishing debut from a fearless visionary with guts to spare.

Maryse Meijer, author of Heartbreaker; Northwood; and Rag.

Wisel’s prose is layered, rich, and sharp. The book isn’t afraid to look directly at violence against women while avoiding the overly glossy sheen of a girl-power narrative. While these stories have grit and gravitas, they also leave room for buoyancy and joy. With Wisel in the driver’s seat, the reader should happily buckle up and enjoy the ride.

—Split Lip Magazine

The way in which Wisel portrays multifaceted suffering in this searing drum of a book is more beautiful, strategic, and empowering than one may expect. Written in ferocious, cutting prose, this book is—as Frankie once described of Natalya—"a beauty so rough that it's pretty," and it is not one to be missed.

—The Rupture

... a terrific debut. The writing is dense and beautiful, and the pacing is sharply self-aware—just when you think you've had too much of these young women's misery, some light and pleasure flares. . . although never too much, and never enough really. It's a rough ride, but a worthwhile one if you're up for it.

— Librarything.com (five stars )

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a bildungsroman of society’s institutions…a spiritual journey for the reader. Wisel’s mastery with the nuances and rhythms of language allow the horizons of her stories to open up. Some of the most alive fictitious characters I’ve met in a long time. The reason the characters jump off the page is Wisel’s language. Her prose pulsates with the stark rhythm of muscular poetry. By writing in an honest voice, we begin to understand from Wisel the humanity (and inhumanity) that pervades their everyday lives.

—Heavy Feather Review

The complexity shows Wisel’s talent for writing realistic characters who will not be tamed, characters whose decisions and behaviors do not change with experience. Her ability to deftly examine these women makes for a satisfying read.

—Another Chicago Magazine

The book’s structure links these stories through something more intuitive than chronology, a thread more akin to the way pain and trauma reverberate through lives.

—Colorado Review