I’m stoked to have a story in Invaders, a lit sci-fi anthology with a killer lineup, including Junot Díaz, Rivka Galchen, George Saunders, Katherine Dunn, Brian Evenson, Jonathan Lethem, Amiri Baraka, W.P. Kinsella, Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, Molly Gloss, and others. Publisher’s Weekly just starred it. Hot diggity! Invaders drops in July.
After we drank wine and talked about southern gothic sci-fi, we drank more wine, raved about the film The Witch, took pictures in a creepy bomb shelter, and then floated up into a misty cluster of evergreens. A great night with Thomas Hammond, Brittany Braddock, Graham Duncan, and Heather Forloines Green of Auntie Bellum. Listen to this, y’all.
I had a great time drinking wine, running my mouth, and exploring creepy bomb shelters with a smart crew from Antie Bellum Magazine. Listen to the podcast, in which we talk about my novel The New and Improved Romie Futch, South Carolina’s mysterious Monkey Island, hamadryas baboons, monsters, psychedelic summers, mind-altering parasites, and more.
I had a hard time keeping my cool when The Los Angeles Review of Books asked me to review Brian Evenson’s brilliant new collection, A Collapse of Horses. I’ve suffered a few side effects, though. Every night at 3:00 am a creature now appears beside my bed. It might be a robot. It might be an armored subhuman (or even a catfish in a tin suit). In a gurgly voice, this “furnisher” attempts to sell me jerky, flashing bits of twisted meat before my groggy eyes. It won’t go away until I buy a piece. I always put the smoked flesh on my night stand, and in the morning I find nothing but a greasy stain.
Check out the amazing cover design from Coffee House Press (three reissues combined with the new collection form this amazing man-beast):
Keith Rawson recommends The New and Improved Romie Futch in LitReactor’s Staff Picks Best Books of 2015 list:
“I absolutely loved this novel, and if Elliott continues along the literary path she’s currently taking, there’s a better chance than not that we may very well have the next Kurt Vonnegut on our hands. Yeah, you heard me right, deal with it. [Review]”
Are you curious about whether or not an incubus can knock up a mortal woman? Are you burning to find out what the heck happened to Christ’s foreskin after the holy circumcision? If so, check out this list I wrote for Electric Literature.
I’m stoked and atingle that Lincoln Michel, author of the wonderful genre-bending collection Upright Beasts, included The Wilds in “The 10 Best Genre-Bending Books.”
For a long time, there have been literary urban planners invested in cordoning off and containing books into their proper plots. They’ve demanded that “literary fiction” confine itself to this complex, and that over here is zoned for “science fiction” and over there zoned only for “magical realism.” Luckily for adventurous readers, there have been plenty of writers who’ve used their books as sledge hammers, knocking down the artificial walls between genres in the night. These writers slip through the holes, strolling through fantasy gardens in the morning and eating lunch at the murder mystery mall before retiring to their macabre abodes in the graveyard of horror. Read more.
Not long ago at Drip on Main I drank a gallon of coffee and attempted to answer R. Mac Jones’s excellent questions. I sputtered gibberish, twitched, and dribbled latte foam, but R. Mac concealed his horror, redacted my rants on brain parasites and angelic speech, and miraculously managed to make me sound coherent in this Fiction Writers Review interview.
I had fun chatting with Lily McLemore from BookPage about mutant hogs, cyborg brains, and taxidermy. She asked me lots of great questions about The New and Improved Romie Futch.
The November issue of O The Oprah Magazine recommends slow-roasted turkey wings and The New and Improved Romie Futch:
“A sad-sack taxidermist joins an intelligence experiment and instantly becomes a certified genius in this frenetically surreal novel.”