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The Wild family moved into the house behind ours. For two years the split-level had been dead, open to prowling neighborhood children; its sunken den had become a nest of slugs and millipedes, its attic a froth of bats. Now eight brothers flung their restless bodies around the property. The largest Wild, a bearded boy of seventeen, shut himself up in the basement den. The littlest Wild, a tangle-haired half-naked thing, rumored to be a biter, lurked around in the shrubbery. The Wilds kept cats, lizards, and ferrets. Rabbits, hamsters, turtles, and snakes. A bubble of musky, ammoniac air enveloped their home like a force field, and the second you dared step through it you felt dizzy; a hundred arrows whistled around your ears.

Read “The Wilds” on Tor.com

Jeff Vandermeer, New York Times bestselling author of the brilliant Southern Reach trilogy, kindly agreed to interview me for the Tin House blog. This happened when he was in the thick of promoting Annihilation, traveling around the country, answering a zillion interview questions himself. Jeff, a genre-border-roving champion of the New Weird, supernaturally productive writer and anthology editor,  somehow makes time to promote the work of fledgling writers–an all-around great guy.

Read “Julia Elliott and Jeff Vandermeer in Conversation” on the Tin House blog

Benjamin Woodward asked eighteen short story writers how they made the leap from short fiction to the novel form. You will find my answer among the responses of Lydia Davis, Charles Baxter, Kevin Wilson, and other writers.

Read “18 Short Story Writers on Why They Decided to Write a Novel” on Buzzfeed Books.

“Regeneration at Mukti,” originally published in  Conjunctions 56: Terra Incognita: The Voyage Issue, is in The Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013)!