COLIN WINNETTE discusses his new novel HAINTS STAY, together with KAROLINA WACLAWIAK

Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio)

 From a rising star in the indie lit world comes a striking new Acid Western in the tradition of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man or Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff. 

Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them between towns. The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they’ve been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own brand of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West’s first one-armed gunslinger. 

Haunting, surreal, and possessing an unsettling humor, Haints Stay will ensure Winnette’s growing reputation as an imaginative stylist and one of the most striking voices of his generation. 

Praise for Haints Stay

“The unexpectedness of Colin Winnette’s fiction is nothing less than thrilling. Haints Stay is a solid, layered work of genre-defying beauty.”—The Lit Pub

“Haints Stay puts to mind the very best contemporary novels of the old West, including those by powerhouses like Charles Portis, Patrick DeWitt, Robert Coover, Oakley Hall, E.L. Doctorow and Sheriff Cormac McCarthy himself, not to mention Thomas McGuane’s classic screenplays for The Missouri Breaks and Tom Horn. But Colin Winnette has his own dark and delightful and surprising agenda. Be wary. He might be the new law in town." —Sam Lipsyte

“Life is nasty, brutish, and short in this noir-tinged Western... that falls somewhat uncomfortably between ‘Deadwood’ and The Crying Game. It sounds like a cross between Daniel Woodrell and Elmore Leonard right up until Winnette flips the script.”—Kirkus Reviews

“If the Western genre could be thought of as a pile of old stones, Haints Stay is a particular piece of lovely spit-shined agate at the top, gleaming in invitation, and under its glow the others are changed.” —Amelia Gray

“Funny, brutal and haunting, Haints Stay takes the traditional Western, turns it inside out, eviscerates it, skins it, and then wears it as a duster. This is the kind of book that would make Zane Grey not only roll over in his grave but rise undead from the ground with both barrels blazing.”—Brian Evenson

“From his curiously harrowing Animal Collection to the glorious guts of Fondly, I trust wherever Colin Winnette’s imagination sees fit to take me. And now — with Haints Stay — we venture to the lawless old West for a story stitched out of animal skins and language that glimmers like blood diamonds. This is a dangerous novel; let’s read it and risk our lives together.”—Saeed Jones

“Before the novel ends, there’s cannibalism, an amputation, a bloody jailhouse shoot-out, a surprise birth, and the slaughter of a town’s entire population. [A] portrait of the frontier as a place where desperation and death were always near at hand.”—Publishers Weekly

“I loved it. Loved it! Haints Stay had me from the very first line—the visceral ante upped and crescendoing nearly every page. Humor, gore, that wonderful unsettling feel you get when you’re reading a book that excites you and kind of scares you as well?,Yes, please.”—Lindsay Hunter

Colin Winnette is the author of several books, including the SPD bestseller Coyote, and Fondly, listed among Salon's "best books of 2013." His writing has appeared in the Believer, the American Reader, McSweeney's, and 9th Letter, among other places. His prizes include the NOS Book Contest (for Coyote) and Sonora Review's Short Short Fiction Prize. He was a finalist for Gulf Coast Magazine's Donald Barthelme Prize for short prose and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Award. He conducts a semi-regular interview series for Electric Literature and is an associate editor of Pank magazine. He lives in San Francisco.

Karolina Waclawiak received her BFA in Screenwriting from USC School of Cinematic Arts and her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, was published by Two Dollar Radio in 2012. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, and The Believer (where she is also an editor). She lives in Los Angeles.