About your stories: The late Saul Steinberg said there are two kinds of artists, those who respond to the history of their art, and those who respond to life itself. You are the second kind. Are you ever.
— Kurt Vonnegut, in correspondence, 2004
In a remarkable variety of forms and masterful prose, Suzanne McConnell's long-awaited short story collection If You Think Your Heart Can Take It traces people’s lives caught on the brink of life-changing moments.
forthcoming from Serving House Books, June 2026
Advanced Praise for If You Think Your Heart Can Take It & Other Stories
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Don’t miss reading these stories. Each is an alchemist’s stone transforming the ordinariness of everyday life into literary truth and artistry.
— Pamela Ryder, Author of Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him:
The Lives of Billy the Kid
These stories trace lives caught in transition and choice. Attentive to the forces that shape us, McConnell pulls readers into moments of tension that make it impossible to turn away.
— Danielle Ofri, editor of Bellevue Literary Review, author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
McConnell is a master of precision. Her prose shines on the page. This collection gloriously pushes the boundaries of the form.
— Joan Leegant, author of Displaced Persons, winner of the New American Press Fiction Prize
Suzanne McConnell writes about human entanglements the way they actually happen—messily––and with a truth you feel in your gut. She pursues the fault line between friendship and obligation, love and exhaustion, hope and collapse. Her gaze is fearless. Her writing is brilliant.
— Dan Pope, author of Housebreaking
However colorful or exotic the setting, McConnell brings us to the abyss–of insanity, of unspeakable loss, or of an actual cliff over the Pacific Ocean. She walks us along a tightrope, but she is effortlessly sure-footed–and seriously entertaining.
— Meredith Sue Willis, author of Oradell at Sea and In the Mountains of America
