Review "Julia Elliott's magical debut collection, "The Wilds", brings together some of the most original, hilarious, and mind-bending stories written in the last two decades. She journeys deep into mythic terrains with an explorer's courage and a savant's wit, and the reports she sends back from imagination's hinterlands are charged with a vernacular that crackles with insight. Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell are similar visionaries in the short story form, but Elliott is very much her own irrepressible voice--and it's one well worth heeding. "The Wilds" is simply a milestone achievement."--Bradford Morrow, author of "The Uninnocent""Julia Elliott's stories--which thrive beautifully somewhere between the lyrically haunting works of Barry Hannah and the retrospective works of Lewis Nordan--offer nothing but the great, beautiful, dark regions of the human heart. These are stories to be cherished, taught, and brooded upon. These are stories in which to bathe oneself."--George Singleton, author of "Stray Decorum"Robots may search for love, but there's nothing wilder than human nature in this genre-bending short story collection from debut writer Elliott . . . This book will take you to places you never dreamed of going and aren't quite sure you want to stay, but you won't regret the journey. --Kirkus"Julia Elliott's magical debut collection, "The Wilds", brings together some of the most original, hilarious, and mind-bending stories written in the last two decades. She journeys deep into mythic terrains with an explorer's courage and a savant's wit, and the reports she sends back from imagination's hinterlands are charged with a vernacular that crackles with insight. Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell are similar visionaries in the short story form, but Elliott is very much her own irrepressible voice--and it's one well worth heeding. "The Wilds" is simply a milestone achievement."--Bradford Morrow, author of "The Uninnocent""Julia Elliott's stories--which thrive beautifully somewhere between the lyrically haunting works of Barry Hannah and the retrospective works of Lewis Nordan--offer nothing but the great, beautiful, dark regions of the human heart. These are stories to be cherished, taught, and brooded upon. These are stories in which to bathe oneself."--George Singleton, author of "Stray Decorum""Robots may search for love, but there's nothing wilder than human nature in this genre-bending short story collection from debut writer Elliott . . . This book will take you to places you never dreamed of going and aren't quite sure you want to stay, but you won't regret the journey."--"Kirkus" "Readers who grew up loving that fizzy, edge-of-the-lake feeling of diving into a tale will adore Julia Elliott's "The Wilds." Elliott's worlds are fully imagined and wholly immersive; her sentences unfurl in the most surprising and glorious ways. These are tantalizingly strange, eerie and funny and unpredictable tales of transformation."--Karen Russell, author of "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" "Julia Elliott's magical debut collection, "The Wilds," brings together some of the most original, hilarious, and mind-bending stories written in the last two decades. She journeys deep into mythic terrains with an explorer's courage and a savant's wit, and the reports she sends back from imagination's hinterlands are charged with a vernacular that crackles with insight. Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell are similar visionaries in the short story form, but Elliott is very much her own irrepressible voice--and it's one well worth heeding. "The Wilds" is simply a milestone achievement."--Bradford Morrow, author of "The Uninnocent" "Julia Elliott's stories--which thrive beautifully somewhere between the lyrically haunting works of Barry Hannah and the retrospective works of Lewis Nordan--offer nothing but the great, beautiful, dark regions of the human heart. These are stories to be cherished, taught, and brooded upon. These are stories in which to bathe oneself."--George Singleton, author of "Stray Decorum" "Julia Elliott's stories are an endangered species--vital, poignant, and rare. Readers should send themselves recklessly into "The Wilds," for they will emerge spellbound, all the better for it."--Kate Bernheimer, author of "H"Remarkable . . . [Elliott's] dark, modern spin on Southern Gothic creates tales that surprise, shock, and sharply depict vice and virtue."--"Publishers Weekly," starred review "Robots may search for love, but there's nothing wilder than human nature in this genre-bending short story collection from debut writer Elliott . . . This book will take you to places you never dreamed of going and aren't quite sure you want to stay, but you won't regret the journey."--"Kirkus" "Humans, robots, and humans with robotic limbs pine for carnal satisfaction in Elliott's impressively inventive, often macabre collection, animated by her characters' outsize appetites for sex, knowledge, faith, and kindness."--"Booklist" "Readers who grew up loving that fizzy, edge-of-the-lake feeling of diving into a tale will adore Julia Elliott's "The Wilds." Elliott's worlds are fully imagined and wholly immersive; her sentences unfurl in the most surprising and glorious ways. These are tantalizingly strange, eerie and funny and unpredictable tales of transformation."--Karen Russell, author of "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" "Julia Elliott's magical debut collection, "The Wilds," brings together some of the most original, hilarious, and mind-bending stories written in the last two decades. She journeys deep into mythic terrains with an explorer's courage and a savant's wit, and the reports she sends back from imagination's hinterlands are charged with a vernacular that crackles with insight. Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell are similar visionaries in the short story form, but Elliott is very much her own irrepressible voice--and it's one well worth heeding. "The Wilds" is simply a milestone achievement."--Bradford Morrow, author of "The Uninnocent" "Julia Elliott's stories--which thrive beautifully somewhere between the lyrically haunting works of Barry Hannah and the retrospective works of Lewis Nordan--offer nothing but the great, beautiful, dark regions of the human heart. These are stories to be cherished, taught, and brooded upon. These are stories in which to bathe oneself."--George Singleton, author of "Stray Decorum" "Julia Elliott's stories are an endangered species--vital, poignant, and rare. Readers should send themselves recklessly into "The Wilds," for they will emerge spellbound, all the better for it."--Kate Bernheimer, author of "How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales"*"Kirkus" names "The Wilds" one of the best books of the year *"BuzzFeed Books" names "The Wilds" one of the 24 Best Fiction Books of 2014 *"The Wilds" is on "Book Riot's" Best of 2014 list *"The Wilds" is a "New York Times" Editors' Choice *"The Wilds" chosen by "Electric Literature" as one of the best short story collections of 2014 "Elliott makes us hear contemporary English in a new way.""The New York Times Book Review" "Remarkable . . . [Elliott's] dark, modern spin on Southern Gothic creates tales that surprise, shock, and sharply depict vice and virtue.""Publishers Weekly," starred review "Robots may search for love, but there s nothing wilder than human nature in this genre-bending short story collection from debut writer Elliott . . . This book will take you to places you never dreamed of going and aren't quite sure you want to stay, but you won't regret the journey.""Kirkus" "Humans, robots, and humans with robotic limbs pine for carnal satisfaction in Elliott s impressively inventive, often macabre collection, animated by her characters outsize appetites for sex, knowledge, faith, and kindness.""Booklist" "This is wacky, bizarre content, but with a nice dose of realism even in the most absurd points. If you like Karen Russell, this is a good choice for you.""Book Riot" "[Elliott's] work is unique and haunting, often drifting into apocalyptic and dystopian territory, but in many ways rooted in reality. I could not turn away from her tales. At the end of my time with "The Wilds," I was completely devoted to Elliott s dark depictions of the world. "The Rumpus" "Elliott s inventive first collection is replete with robotic limbs and levitation but also grit and force. A dark piece of magic that glows in the reading.""Flavorwire" "Often using dystopian and fantasy elements, Elliott s writing is imaginative, her characters are often strange, and the whole collection is a dark treat you simply can t put down.""New Pages" "Part whimsical fairy tale, part technological exploration, fused with biological ruminations you won t be disappointed by this vivid collection.""True Reader Reviews" Readers who grew up loving that fizzy, edge-of-the-lake feeling of diving into a tale will adore Julia Elliott's "The Wilds." Elliott's worlds are fully imagined and wholly immersive; her sentences unfurl in the most surprising and glorious ways. These are tantalizingly strange, eerie and funny and unpredictable tales of transformation. Karen Russell, author of "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" Julia Elliott s magical debut collection, "The Wilds," brings together some of the most original, hilarious, and mind-bending stories written in the last two decades. She journeys deep into mythic terrains with an explorer s courage and a savant s wit, and the reports she sends back from imagination s hinterlands are charged with a vernacular that crackles with insight. Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell are similar visionaries in the short story form, but Elliott is very much her own irrepressible voiceand it s one well worth heeding. "The Wilds" is simply a milestone achievement. Bradford Morrow, author of "The Uninnocent" Julia Elliott s storieswhich thrive beautifully somewhere between the lyrically haunting works of Barry Hannah and the retrospective works of Lewis Nordanoffer nothing but the great, beautiful, dark regions of the human heart. These are stories to be cherished, taught, and brooded upon. These are stories in which to bathe oneself."George Singleton, author of "Stray Decorum" Julia Elliott s stories are an endangered speciesvital, poignant, and rare. Readers should send themselves recklessly into "The Wilds," for they will emerge spellbound, all the better for it. Kate Bernheimer, author of "How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales" ""The Wilds" by Julia Elliott a very well-written book of short stories that are creepy and weird in the good way. In the title story, a girl wearing a homemade crown of bird skulls tells of getting taken prisoner by a feral pack of boys, known as the Wilds, who live nearby. 'Their chests glowed with firefly juice. They had steak knives strapped to their belts and some of them wore goggles.' How can you go wrong with that setup?"Arthur Bradford, fiction and children s writer ("Dogwalker, Benny s Brigade")" About the Author Julia Elliott's fiction has appeared in "Tin House," the "Georgia Review," "Conjunctions," "Fence," "Puerto del Sol," "Mississippi Review," "Best American Fantasy," and other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. Her novel "The New and Improved Romie Futch" will be published by Tin House Books in 2015, and she is currently working on a novel about Hamadryas baboons, a species that she has studied as an amateur primatologist. She teaches English and women's and gender studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where she lives with her daughter and husband. She and her spouse, John Dennis, are founding members of Grey Egg, an experimental music collective.
F**B
Five Stars
Pleased with item
G**S
Wild things, you make my heart sing!
There are two kinds of fantastic disruption in Julia Elliott's freshman collection of short stories, The Wilds - - in the first, the banal surfaces of everyday life swell and metastasize into strange encounters with the miraculous and possibly terrible; in the second, Elliott pushes and prods a weird but none-too-alien premise to its absurd and often hilarious conclusion. Stories like "Limbs," "Regeneration at Mukti," "The Caveman Diet," and "Love Machine" belong to the latter category. These tales float somewhere between social satire and comedy - - and remind me a lot of George Saunders' early fabulations or more evolved Donald Barthelme confections. To be honest, while entertaining, these are less successful stories.The first category, the eruption of weirdness from within the grain of contemporary American life, is where Elliott really shines. These stories - -like "Rapture," "Feral, " the curiously truncated "Organisms," and the collection's title story - - work because Elliott communicates her sur-reailties in a voice that brings the grotesque poetics of Southern Gothic into contact with a world - - of Facebook, Garfield, and Hobby Lobby franchises - - dedicated to erasing mystery and danger. Wild dogs swarm suburbia in "Feral" and draw the story's narrator into stranger realms of freedom. A mutated bacillus in "Organisms" makes teenage alienation into a real and mysterious epidemic. In "Rapture," a levitating, grotesque, old-timey Baptist grandmother upends an innocent slumber party and offers the narrator a seductive glimpse into worlds beyond the bourgeois comforts of the Dixie City Fashion Mall and Neil Diamond "double shots" on AM radio. "Rapture" is one of the most charming tales in the collection. The other is the title story, "The Wilds," where first love blossoms amidst garden parties, adolescent pustules, and incipient lycanthropy.Elliott's is just the kind imagination that's missing in so much American fiction today - - odd, rich, compelling, fiercely individual and beautiful.Word on the street is that Elliott is preparing her first novel - - and I'm hoping she sticks to the twisted, overgrown, diabolically delicious and dangerously dappled path of stories like "Rapture" and "The Wilds."
K**R
Just about perfect
I’m going to rip off something from Matt Bell’s Facebook page for my review of The Wilds By Julia Elliot:“It's easier for people to let go if the world is strange. In a realist story, it sometimes feels like you're reading someone else's story. In a certain kind of non-realist story, the slight unfamiliarity of events unfolding in a familiar setting can let you inhabit a story, can make you feel like its happening to you.”The quote is from a talk writer Diane Cook gave to Bell’s undergrad workshop at ASU, and I thought is was a fitting way to describe Elliot’s excellent debut collection of weird stories. The stories in The Wilds all take place in utterly familiar environments: Suburban neighborhoods, a convalescent home, the neighborhood bar, the local high school. The settings are benign and nothing more than static in our day-to-day world, and each of these settings would make for ideal canvass’ for a contemporary writer to tell equally benign tales of lost love and broken ambitions.But what Elliot does is twist these settings and injects them with a healthy dose of the weird, and turns them into something magical and akin to an adult fairy tale. The suburban neighborhood becomes overrun with wild dogs, broken entirely free from their bonds with humanity; the convalescent home becomes a laboratory where geneticists and robotics experts restore the memories and bodies of the old; the neighborhood bar becomes a place where frightened adults gather to gossip about the plague sweeping the country where teenagers become addicted to electronic devices and junk food and then fall into a mysterious coma, only to suddenly awaken and disappear.The minute strangeness of these stories allows the reader to become truly lost in these odd worlds, and you can’t help but feel for the too brief of time you’re inhabiting them that this is actually the world we live in, where the impossible simply walks alongside us and we think of it as nothing more than common place.Elliot’s prose is elegant and poetic, and her imagination seems boundless. I try to avoid using words like ‘perfect’ or ‘masterpiece’, but it’s nearly impossible for me to not use them when describing The Wilds, because each story is a miniature masterpiece, and the collection is just about as perfect a short story collection as I’ve run into in years.
S**I
Literary fiction that is slightly left-of-center
I found this book on a "weird" fiction list and decided to pick it up in anticipation of a very long air plane flight. It certainly passed the time. I was impressed by the stories, which have a subtle weirdness to them. There is a great deal of complexity and ambiguity in Julia Elliott's work that leaves you speculating on the characters and the imaginative environments she constructs. The story themes range in content (sci-fi, magical realism and literary fiction with a slightly distorted element). If you are looking for straight up genre fiction (horror, "hard" sci-fi or fantasy), I imagine you will be let down by this collection. However, Elliott's work is most entertaining in the ways it defies genre conventions and plays with them (although not all the stories in this volume are successful at this, and getting through the first story "Rapture" took some patience). For those who like literary fiction that is slightly left-of-center, you will probably find these stories entertaining.
M**A
Decidedly dark and wonderfully weird short stories
When my favorite authors take the time to recommend books, I pay close attention. The Wilds was recently recommended on Twitter by Carmen Maria Machado, so I wasted no time in acquiring a copy. She didn’t lead me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of decidedly dark and wonderfully weird short stories. There are lots of great genre flavors to enjoy herein, some science fiction, some horror, some magical realism, and lots of wonderfully creative in-betweens.
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