“There are a lot of found body parts in Drew Buxton’s So Much Heart, but these aren’t gruesome tales. Bodies—or just the parts—are handled in the same straightforward manner as the arrival of a pizza and Oreos before bedtime, a high-stakes Pogs game. And when things go full-on surreal, all remains quite normal. In fact, everything is just fine here in So Much Heart. I’m not sure what to call this ultra-realistic surrealism, but I love it and I love these stories.”

—Mary Miller, author of Biloxi and Always Happy Hour


“You’re the kind of honest that happens when you’re lonely. You’re late-night driving through Texas with a stranger—a pizza delivery guy for Papa John’s. It’s humid, unhinged, but hopeful. In So Much Heart, Drew Buxton pulls us close to losers and rejects, and we recognize ourselves. We scratch each other’s backs.”

—Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, author of Sleepovers


“So Much Heart drips authenticity with every sentence, in every story, within this high-spirited collection. Drew Buxton somehow manages to take bizarre feelings buried deep inside of us and make them into buoyant tales that we can all relate to on a deeply personal level. He makes the awkward, okay. The odd, feel casual. And erratic human emotions something to be celebrated, not shunned. In short, So Much Heart is the ultimate vibe check for everyone who reads it. Whether you pass is up to you.”

—Mallory Smart, author of The Only Living Girl In Chicago

“Buxton’s stories read like that shot in Lynch’s Blue Velvet where we push past the green grass of Norman Rockwell Americana and see the rotten, cruel underbelly of things. Corpses, recess, cockfights in Vegas—these stories feel like cinema. “I want to tell him how, sometimes when I’m alone in the house, I shit my pants on purpose.” Funny, unnerving, and gothic, these stories feel like blood relations to Donald Ray Pollock, Amelia Gray, or Stephen King.”

—Oliver Zarandi, author of Soft Fruit in the Sun

“Drew Buxton’s stories are a joy: surprising, keenly observed, and—truth in advertising!—full of heart. An exciting new writer to watch.”

—Michael Hingston, editor, Short Story Advent Calendar

“I don’t know that I’ve ever read stories quite like the ones housed inside this collection—a surreal, vivid, and entirely unpretentious blend of Saturday morning cartoons, absurd horror, and manic realism. There are jokes in these stories that, years after reading for the first time, still make me laugh out loud when I think of them, and little grace notes of humanity that still cross my mind at odd hours. This thing rules.”

—Chris Vanjonack, has an agent

“Drew Buxton’s stories are full of cheap beer, dead bodies, failed therapies, and the throes of addiction. But, in all this doubt and darkness, he never fails to show us the humanity at the center. Buxton’s stories are relentlessly compelling.”

—John Dermot Woods, author of The Baltimore Atrocities