Kirkus Best Fiction Books of 2014
Kirkus lists The Wilds as one of the “Best Fiction Books of 2014”! Check out the list here.
Kirkus lists The Wilds as one of the “Best Fiction Books of 2014”! Check out the list here.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn asked me some great questions in this interview: “Julia Elliott on ‘The Wilds’ and ‘A Kind of Delirious Linguistic Excess.'”
True Reader Reviews asked me some great questions and also imagined what I’d look (and smell) like upon walking into a room: “If Julia rang my doorbell, I imagine her in overalls none to clean, but only with dirt from working a garden. A sun hat would be on her head and as she entered she’d bring a earthy smell to the premises that would go with the dirt under her fingernails. Everything about her would imply that this is an author who doesn’t mind sweating and getting her hands dirty.”
Read the full interview here.
The Huffington Post Books Blog just posted “The New Southern Gothic,” in which I ponder the genre and claim to suffer from “obscure yet-to-be-discovered brain parasites that might, when combined with decades of ancestral looniness, create a sensitivity to a particular species of fecund strangeness that can be described as ‘Southern Gothic.'”
My Georgia Review sponsored reading at the Globe in Athens was a transcendent experience for me–I was inspired (and tipsy) enough to attempt character voice impersonations, a first for me. The lighting was perfect, the crowd buzzed, the fiction writer fortified with a ginormous wheat beer. I’m forever grateful to Stephen Corey, David Ingle, and the rest of the crew at The Georgia Review. Janet Geddis of Avid Bookshop made the event extra special. And Barbette Houser from the Flagpole wrote a vivid summary of the event.
Read “Author Julia Elliott Intrigues at the Globe” from the Flagpole.
The Rumpus kindly highlighted The Wilds in “This Week in Short Fiction.”
“Along the lines of fabulous illustrations, have you seen the cover for Julia Elliott’s new story collection, The Wilds, birthed on Tuesday by Tin House Books? The masked, tailed, bird-hatted smiling lady on the front of Elliott’s book is eye-grabbing to say the least, but digging a little deeper, there are some hallucinogenic stories to be had within as well. The title story of her collection was published last week on Tor.com. . . .”
Check out the full article here.
I sat down at a coffee shop to discuss my collection The Wilds with Rodney Welch from The Free Times. Two minutes in, we were discussing David Cronenberg, brain parasites, and the visceral stickiness of my stories. A great way to spend an afternoon!
Read Rodney’s terrific article “Wild, Wild Life” (The Free Times)
Bustle included The Wilds as one of “October 2114’s Best Books”
“Julia Elliot is a narrative tinkerer, and her desire to bend genres and experiment with the laws of storytelling is on full display within her latest short story collection, The Wilds. Sci-fi infused with touches of Southern Gothic, and dystopia meshed with fairy tale, her unique ability to blend has explosive results . . . .”
Read the full article on Bustle.
Kim Winternheimer from The Master’s Review asked me lots of great questions about the gothic and the grotesque, the texture of language in my work, the connections between science and the surreal, and many other interesting topics.
Read the full interview on the Master’s Review Blog
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