Alan Heathcock has won a Whiting Award, a National Magazine Award, has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. His story collection, VOLT, was a 'Best Book of the Year' selection from numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, Salon, and the Chicago Tribune, was named as a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award.
"""Shaped from foreboding, almost neobiblical prose, 40 is a fast-paced vision of a shattered American future: a place of violent factions, barbaric pageantry, remote-control rain, and angels made real. Alan Heathcock has created a speculative thriller that glitters with imagination and glows with heart."" --Anthony Doerr, author of Cloud Cuckoo Land ""With 40, Alan Heathcock has come blazing into the novel form, giving us an original mythos, a tour de force of metamorphosis and survival. If an angry Flannery O'Connor wrote postapocalyptic fiction with a pen of fire, it might look something like this."" --Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers ""Forged amid the ashes and blood of climate catastrophe, 40 invokes a genre-busting Wild West where faith and war and family converge with razor-sharp prose, volleying to become a compass for an uncertain future. These words will cut deep into your soul and fill it with angelic feathers and the detritus of a dying world--often beautiful and horrific at once. You can try to corral 40 at a roundtable of Paolo Bacigalupi, Angela Carter, and Cormac McCarthy, but this near-future prophecy is chiefly Heathcockian."" --Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark"