The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast
New and Selected Stories
A nun crashes her car. An unborn child sings to its mother. A troubled priest is in the market for a London apartment.
In The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast, John L'Heureux explores head-on life's biggest questions, and the moments — of joy, doubt, transcendence — that alter the course of life. Compiled as he neared the end of his life, and conceived as the legacy of a life's work, The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast brims with elegance, humour, and compassion, welcoming both the ordinary and the rapturous. L'Heureux is a writer of astonishing vision — a master of storytelling and the sentence.
John L'Heureux spent his long, prolific career exploring questions of morality and faith in stories that entertain, surprise, and sometimes disturb; and The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast compiles the enduring stories of a distinctive American writer.
'A sweeping posthumous collection wrestles with faith, irony, and the redemptive nature of love.' — Kirkus, starred review
'Howling, savagely powerful short stories [that] dramatise the brutal collisions of divine will and human nature. They abound in grace.' — Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
'This collection is luminous and breathtaking, varied and delightful and surprising, scattering perfectly shaped gems before us.' — Financial Times
'Darkly funny, bittersweet, audacious, tender... it is so sad to think that we will have no more short stories from this master of the form.' — Joyce Carol Oates
'John L'Heureux's work is revelatory. In the way of master writers, so much of what he accomplishes on the page seems effortless and organic, divinely inspired. This book will change you, and his voice and his characters will stay with you long after you leave them.' — Jesmyn Ward
'[His] stories embody a strong sense of humour about the vagaries of faith and life and the fragility of human convictions…He allowed his characters both their comic foibles and their occasional, unexpected moments of grace.' — Deborah Treisman
John L'Heureux was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He spent seventeen years as a Jesuit priest, after which he worked as an editor at the Atlantic; and for more than thirty years taught American literature and creative writing at Stanford, where he was the longtime director of the writing program. His stories appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Harper's. He was the author of twenty-three books, including the novels The Beggar's Pawn, The Medici Boy, and The Shrine at Altamira; and the short-story collections Desires and Comedians. He lived with his wife in northern California until his death in 2019.
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