Download The Wilds eBook

by Julia Elliott

Julia Elliott Short Stories and Anthologies English

ISBN:

1935639927

Author:

Julia Elliott

Category:

Short Stories & Anthologies

Language:

English

Publisher:

Tin House Books; Reprint edition (October 14, 2014)

Pages:

370 pages

EPUB book:

1721 kb

FB2 book:

1261 kb

DJVU:

1271 kb

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Rating:

4.4

Votes:

299

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Julia Elliott's The Wilds.

Julia Elliott's The Wilds. A fantastical collection of short stories, a Katamari ball of psychics, vegans, and other trendy pop-intellectual characters all fleshed out in the most cartoonish way. She loves the zany, media buzzwords. The creativity and unbridled view of the future is beautifully done in this Southern Gothic short story collection. I was fascinated by a short piece in which the elderly main character receives the help of robotic legs as she struggles with past romances.

ns zombified by office work and Internet surfing. But so was Zugnord, once. Projected behind him on a vast screen is his former self, Wilbur Sims, a paunchy, befuddled dumpling of a man in rumpled khakis. He squints at the camera like some subterranean rodent.

Электронная книга "The Wilds", Julia Elliott. Эту книгу можно прочитать в Google Play Книгах на компьютере, а также на устройствах Android и iOS. Выделяйте текст, добавляйте закладки и делайте заметки, скачав книгу "The Wilds" для чтения в офлайн-режиме. She is currently working on a novel about hamadryas baboons, a species she has studied as an amateur primatologist.

In The Wilds, Julia Elliott's debut short story collection, speculative fiction meets Southern gothic to create stories that highlight the fantastic strangeness of contemporary life. its participants to endure grotesque suffering before achieving perfection. Elliott specializes in drawing from the peculiarities of the everyday to imagine larger-than-life scenarios. Elliott takes a phenomenon - whether Internet addiction, human attraction, puberty, outlandish spa treatments, or the Paleo Diet trend - and blows it up to bizarre and mythical proportions. Much of the pleasure of reading Elliott's stories comes from their brash exaggeration.

FREE shipping on qualifying offers. Teetering between the ridiculous and the sublime, The Wilds blends Southern gothic strangeness with dystopian absurdities.

She has won a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Fantasy, and Best American Short Stories.

Julia Elliott's magical debut collection, The Wilds, brings .

Julia Elliott's magical debut collection, The Wilds, brings together some of the most original, hilarious, and mind-bending stories written in the last two decades. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award.

Teetering between the ridiculous and the sublime, The Wilds blends Southern gothic strangeness with dystopian absurdities, sci-fi speculations, and fairy-tale transformations.

At an obscure South Carolina nursing home, a lost world reemerges as a disabled elderly woman undergoes newfangled brain-restoration procedures and begins to explore her environment with the assistance of strap-on robot legs. At a deluxe medical spa on a nameless Caribbean island, a middle-aged woman hopes to revitalize her fading youth with grotesque rejuvenating therapies that combine cutting-edge medical technologies with holistic approaches and the pseudo-religious dogma of Zen-infused self-help. And in a rinky-dink mill town, an adolescent girl is unexpectedly inspired by the ravings and miraculous levitation of her fundamentalist friend’s weird grandmother. These are only a few of the scenarios readers encounter in Julia Elliott’s debut collection The Wilds. In her genre-bending stories, Elliott blends Southern gothic strangeness with dystopian absurdities, sci-fi speculations with fairy-tale transformations. Teetering between the ridiculous and the sublime, Elliott’s language-driven fiction uses outlandish tropes to capture poignant moments in her humble characters’ lives. Without abandoning the tenets of classic storytelling, Elliott revels in lush lyricism, dark humor, and experimental play.

Avarm

There are two kinds of fantastic disruption in Julia Elliott's freshman collection of short stories, The Wilds - - in the first, the banal surfaces of everyday life swell and metastasize into strange encounters with the miraculous and possibly terrible; in the second, Elliott pushes and prods a weird but none-too-alien premise to its absurd and often hilarious conclusion. Stories like "Limbs," "Regeneration at Mukti," "The Caveman Diet," and "Love Machine" belong to the latter category. These tales float somewhere between social satire and comedy - - and remind me a lot of George Saunders' early fabulations or more evolved Donald Barthelme confections. To be honest, while entertaining, these are less successful stories.

The first category, the eruption of weirdness from within the grain of contemporary American life, is where Elliott really shines. These stories - -like "Rapture," "Feral, " the curiously truncated "Organisms," and the collection's title story - - work because Elliott communicates her sur-reailties in a voice that brings the grotesque poetics of Southern Gothic into contact with a world - - of Facebook, Garfield, and Hobby Lobby franchises - - dedicated to erasing mystery and danger. Wild dogs swarm suburbia in "Feral" and draw the story's narrator into stranger realms of freedom. A mutated bacillus in "Organisms" makes teenage alienation into a real and mysterious epidemic. In "Rapture," a levitating, grotesque, old-timey Baptist grandmother upends an innocent slumber party and offers the narrator a seductive glimpse into worlds beyond the bourgeois comforts of the Dixie City Fashion Mall and Neil Diamond "double shots" on AM radio. "Rapture" is one of the most charming tales in the collection. The other is the title story, "The Wilds," where first love blossoms amidst garden parties, adolescent pustules, and incipient lycanthropy.

Elliott's is just the kind imagination that's missing in so much American fiction today - - odd, rich, compelling, fiercely individual and beautiful.

Word on the street is that Elliott is preparing her first novel - - and I'm hoping she sticks to the twisted, overgrown, diabolically delicious and dangerously dappled path of stories like "Rapture" and "The Wilds."

Malalrajas

I’m going to rip off something from Matt Bell’s Facebook page for my review of The Wilds By Julia Elliot:

“It's easier for people to let go if the world is strange. In a realist story, it sometimes feels like you're reading someone else's story. In a certain kind of non-realist story, the slight unfamiliarity of events unfolding in a familiar setting can let you inhabit a story, can make you feel like its happening to you.”

The quote is from a talk writer Diane Cook gave to Bell’s undergrad workshop at ASU, and I thought is was a fitting way to describe Elliot’s excellent debut collection of weird stories. The stories in The Wilds all take place in utterly familiar environments: Suburban neighborhoods, a convalescent home, the neighborhood bar, the local high school. The settings are benign and nothing more than static in our day-to-day world, and each of these settings would make for ideal canvass’ for a contemporary writer to tell equally benign tales of lost love and broken ambitions.

But what Elliot does is twist these settings and injects them with a healthy dose of the weird, and turns them into something magical and akin to an adult fairy tale. The suburban neighborhood becomes overrun with wild dogs, broken entirely free from their bonds with humanity; the convalescent home becomes a laboratory where geneticists and robotics experts restore the memories and bodies of the old; the neighborhood bar becomes a place where frightened adults gather to gossip about the plague sweeping the country where teenagers become addicted to electronic devices and junk food and then fall into a mysterious coma, only to suddenly awaken and disappear.

The minute strangeness of these stories allows the reader to become truly lost in these odd worlds, and you can’t help but feel for the too brief of time you’re inhabiting them that this is actually the world we live in, where the impossible simply walks alongside us and we think of it as nothing more than common place.

Elliot’s prose is elegant and poetic, and her imagination seems boundless. I try to avoid using words like ‘perfect’ or ‘masterpiece’, but it’s nearly impossible for me to not use them when describing The Wilds, because each story is a miniature masterpiece, and the collection is just about as perfect a short story collection as I’ve run into in years.

hardy

I have such mixed feelings regarding this book. On the one hand the authors writing is exquisitely descriptive, and creates vivid imagery. She is a very talented writer. Having said that, there were times where I really had to push myself to keep on reading because the imagery was so grotesque that I didn't find it enjoyable. I'm glad I read it, but I don't know that I would recommend it to anybody else.

Detenta

Whimsical, lyrical, effervescent prose. Imaginative storytelling that skirts between literary and speculative with a a sense of wonder and abandon. A charming collection, through and through.

Livina

A solid collection of dark, weird, dystopian stories. Quick read. In many of her stories, she takes current trends ("natural" spa treatments, paleo diet, obesity, internet addiction) and magnifies them to highlight the absurdities and sadness of these trends.

Glei

I laughed a lot as I read this, and almost always wished for more at a story's conclusion. If this book were ever to be illustrated, I'd nominate R. Crumb or Frank Kozick (sp? too lazy to google) for the job. Julia Elliot's experimental pieces are evocative and beautiful, visions both rich and disgusting, like a platter of gleaming viscera adorned with candy sprinkles. These pyrotechnics, however, manage not to subvert the honesty that makes these stories feel relatable. They'll stick with you awhile.

Tyler Is Not Here

Love this book! I had to order it for a Creative Writing class but I actually enjoy reading it. The one I received was an "Advanced Readers Copy," which I highly recommend. The cover is made out of this lovely material that feels great when I hold the book. The stories are fun and inventive. 10/10.