"These elegant, moving stories by Becky Hagenston offer so much, their emotional scope reaching far beyond the narrative constraints of short fiction. You'll set down this book with a sad, knowing smile, understanding that our modest lives might not turn out as we hope, but there is a certain beauty to our frailty and humor and bruised-heart sadness."
— Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding
"Scavengers serves up Becky Hagenston’s lightsome prose and quirky humor to dazzling effect, with gorgeous, funny heartbreak on every page. These are beautiful, transcendent stories, where a moment’s impulse reveals a deeply rooted desire, where kissing a new friend or opening the door to a stranger can lead, as in a fairy tale, to an entirely new world, one that is startling, dangerous, and divine."
— Cary Holladay, author of Horse People: Stories
"Becky Hagenston is so good, a true master of the short story, it's no wonder she keeps winning prizes for her fiction. She is wickedly funny, deadly smart, and her characters—desperate, abandoned, strange, sneaky, wonderfully strange and beautiful souls—never fail to deliver that devastating heart punch you know is coming and can't help but want. Scavengers is a heavyweight addition to her impressive and rapidly growing body of excellent work."
— Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
"Becky Hagenston possesses a voice that is so pure, vivid, and true. Her sentences move with fluidity and grace and propel you forward as if being carried by the wind. We know her characters, see them in the grocery store or wave to them as they water the lawn across the street. But in the stories of Scavengers we are taken behind the emotional curtain and share in the struggle of what we hope for, how to get it, or do we even know."
— Michael Farris Smith, award-winning author of RIVERS and THE HANDS OF STRANGERS
"Scavengers features twelve of the freshest, most inspiring pieces of short fiction I have read in years. . . . These pieces are funny and devastating, often tinged with what some call 'magical realism,' and yes, profoundly and beautifully strange. . . . Scavengers is short fiction done right."
— Mississippi Clarion-Ledger