My Heart Has More Rooms Than a Whorehouse

A series of linked stories following the members of a large Latinx family exploring the pressure points of familial obligations and the complexities of love.

From the author of Malas comes a short story collection that centers the challenges of family, with characters constantly trying to navigate a web of allegiances and seeking breathing space for themselves. A young boy from the barrio settles a wager his dead father made with a rich man. A sister tries to make sense of her brother’s career as a bull rider. A group of kids searches for the bogeyman haunting their grandmother’s house. A suburban wife aches to understand her volatile husband.

All these individual’s dreams, desires, and fears swirl together to form a portrait of a Latinx family—one that’s imperfect and difficult but truer to life than any one perspective could be.Marcela Fuentes is an award-winning fiction writer and essayist. Her work has appeared in the Indiana Review, Texas Highways, Ploughshares, and other journals. Her debut novel, Malas, was a Good Morning America Book Club pick for June 2024, and was long-listed for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her linked story collection, My Heart Has More Rooms Than a Whorehouse is forthcoming from Viking. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas.