Battleborn Watkins published
Battleborn, a collection of short stories, in 2012 with publishing house
Riverhead.
The New York Times reviewed her collection as being "brutally unsentimental," writing that "Watkins's characters wish to make sense of their pain, but also to be assured that they are not alone in it."
Battleborn won many prizes, including The
Story Prize,
Dylan Thomas Prize, The New York Public Library
Young Lions Fiction Award, The Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. is a surrealistic novel inspired by the Californian drought and by the lives of outcasts in the desert. It is Watkins' second book and first novel. The work received positive reviews.
Slate called her debut novel, "enthralling," In the
New York Times Sunday Book Review, reviewer Emily St. John Mandel wrote that "[a] great pleasure of the book is Watkins's fearlessness." The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly which said it was "packed with persuasive detail, luminous writing, and a grasp of the history (popular, political, natural, and imagined) needed to tell a story that is original yet familiar, strange yet all too believable." A finalist for the
Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Watkins was also selected as one of the
National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35."
"On Pandering" Watkins critically questioned her own motives of publishing
Battleborn in the 2016 Winter Issue of
Tin House in her essay, "On Pandering," asserting that the book had unconsciously been written for the white male literary establishment aka the white supremacist patriarchy whose values she had internalized, and that only motherhood had delivered her from its burdensome claims. "The whole book's a pander." The essay, which observed that "misogyny is the water we swim in," appeared to critical reception and, according to the
New Yorker, was "discussed heatedly for weeks, even months, thereafter."
Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams called it a "must-read essay" and
Jia Tolentino of
Jezebel.com called it "unusually honest," suggesting "it will be talked about for quite some time." Originally, "On Pandering" was given as a lecture during the 2015 ''Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop.''
''I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness'' Watkins' second novel, ''I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness
, was published in 2021 by Riverhead. The novel, considered a work of autofiction, was summarized in the Los Angeles Review of Books as being "...about a young mother refusing to conform to societal expectations, abandoning those who love her in search of herself." The novel is described as "fiercely committed to destroying the idea that personal mythology can be only true or false." In their review of the work, the Los Angeles Times'' describes Watkins as "the most riveting voice of the unsalvageable West." == Bibliography ==