"In Bombshell Wieland takes a shocking story from our 
national news, the uni-bomber, and casts her speculative, 
fictional eye on it. She has poked her hand through the 
tent flap of reality into the rarefied air of the 
imagination. Like a master ventriloquist, she throws her 
voice into three disparate characters, all of them deeply 
affected - even maimed, psychologically if not physically - 
by the obsessions of a mad bomber. Bombshell is one of the 
most engaging, one of the most vividly and intelligently 
crafted novels I've had the pleasure of reading." - Allen Wier


"Liza Wieland's brilliant work commingles death, sexuality, 
and the desperate search of children for ways of assuring 
themselves of love. The novel is as much about telling, and 
about learning to be told, as it is about serial bombing and 
a hatred of technological civilization. The transactions of 
art are as much a subject of this novel as are the rituals 
and dangers of girlhood. These are some of the best pages 
of prose fiction I have read in a very long time." - Frederick Busch


Liza Wieland's mesmerizing new novel poses the questions: 
what if such a criminal, whose personal losses and obsessions 
have terrorized America, had a daughter - a beautiful blonde 
dancer in Las Vegas? What if she had a stepbrother who knew 
the truth? Wieland's novel suggests that the legacy of The 
Bomb detonated on July 16, 1945, is this mad professor's 
string of bombings, fifty years later. Through the personal 
stories of these three characters, Wieland shows that it's 
never clear where privacy ends and public life begins. And that 
we must take part in the lives around us, take blame, take care.


"From the first page this novel grabbed me and there was no 
relenting. Liza Wieland weaves an intimate family story into 
the terror from our headlines, and her novel is a fresh, 
disturbing look at each. She gets inside these people with 
uncanny empathy. Bombshell rings with an unnerving understanding 
of people who are unsure of their grip - at the end of their 
rope. This big strong book is simply compelling." - Ron Carlson


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LIZA WIELAND grew up in Atlanta, the setting for her 
award-winning first novel, The Names of the Lost, 
which is also a story based on newspaper headlines - about an 
unexplained string of child murders (SMU, 1992). As she puts it, 
"When I think about where my books come from, it seems to me that 
there's no such thing as the whole truth. Except in fiction. News, 
history, fact, all masquerade as truth, but for me, they are never 
enough; they never tell the whole story. My interest is in imagining 
the story complete." The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a 1999 
NEA Fellowship, Wieland has published two story collections, 
Discovering America (Random House, 1994) and You Can Sleep
While I Drive (SMU, 1999). She teaches creative writing and American
literature at California State University.