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)!
