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
Beatrice was my first ‘love’. The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy. Microprocessors whirred within me. Interface adaptors fluttered. Various regulators jumped out of sequence as I reveled in the perfection of her organs – especially the beautiful efficiency of her heart, which throbbed at the core of her, even when she was at rest.
Read “The Love Machine” online at www.granta.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.
Call me a trendmonger, but I’ve sprung for a tree house. My bamboo pod hovers amid galba trees, nestled in jungle but open to the sea, the porch equipped with hemp hammocks. A flowering vine snakes along the railings, pimping its wistful perfume. With a single remote control, I may adjust the ceiling fans, fine-tune the lighting, or lift the plate-glass windows, which flip open like beetle wings. My eco-friendly rental has so many amenities, but my favorite is the toilet: a stainless basin that whisks your droppings through a pipe, down into a pit of coprophagic beetles. These bugs, bred to feast on human shit, have an enzyme in their gut that makes the best compost on the planet—a humus so black you’d think it was antimatter. The spa uses it to feed the orchids in the Samsara Complex. As visitors drift amid the blossoms, we may contemplate the life cycle, the transformation of human waste into ethereal petals and auras of scent.
Read “Regeneration at Mukti” on www.conjunctions.com.
“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)!
