Four mutually loathing brothers fold hundreds of paper cranes for a contest to determine who will own the family plantation house. A young man counts every step to and from a factory in which he winnows the Qs from heaps of new-minted Scrabble tiles. Three new BAs spend months after graduation tunneling beneath the hometown of one of them. A professional substitute grandmother gets queasy about her new family when she discovers they also retain a faux child. That last story, “Grand Stand-In,” is the creepiest in the book, though the bad-dream pulp-noir exercise, “The Shooting Man,” is a close, gritty runner-up. Two stories of teens and sex, “Mortal Kombat” and “Go, Fight, Win”—the only third-person narratives here—express great though measured sympathy. Wildly imaginative in the manner of new weirdness fiction (see Feeling Very Strange, 2006), Wilson’s work is also warmly compassionate in tenor. He creates an appealing voice for each first-person narrator he invents, and in third person, he is flat-out magisterial, with more than a hint of the magical. Watch him closely. --Ray Olson
“Turns the genre of Southern fiction on its head…Wilson’s fully realized characters keep the stories grounded.” (Bomb Magazine )
“Geniously surreal but affecting short stories about spontaneous combustion, Scrabble and angst at all ages. RIYL (Read if you love): George Saunders.” (Louisville Courier Journal )
“Lush with imagination, humanity, and wit. (TheRumpus.net )
“To write such masterful stories takes a graceful eye, and, even more, a compassionate heart. Wilson has both. His disturbing, moving tales burrow their way under our skin and stay there.” (Time Out New York )
“These short stories by Kevin Wilson…are weird in the best way. They are bizarre notions that are fleshed out in sustained narrative by a deft maestro...beautifully rendered.” (Memphis Commercial Appeal )
“Kevin Wilson is the unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers.... Jesus Christ is this guy good.” (Owen King )
“I’m drawn to particular authors, folks like George Saunders and Stacey Richter and Kevin Wilson…who I know are going to kick my ass.” (Steve Almond, author of CANDYFREAK )
“Kevin Wilson’s brilliant debut is full of characters you won’t be able to forget and wouldn’t want to even if you could.” (Brock Clarke, bestselling author of AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE TO WRITERS' HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND )
“Wilson’s little time-bomb fables have a surrealist zip, like miniature Magritte paintings come to life.” (Washington Post )
“There are 11 troubling, strange, offbeat tales in this collection… It’s those sharp insights that keep you reading Wilson’s unusual stories.” (The Advocate (Baton Rouge) )
“His work shimmers…Wilson offers fabulous twists and somersaults of the imagination… As Wilson continues to dig into the texture and mystery of the world, his fiction should grow, like his best characters, in strange and remarkable ways.” (New York Times Book Review )
“Acute and uniformly unsettling, these fictions explore themes of loss and loneliness with fresh young insight, and occasionally with a faint rainbow at the end.” (Boston Globe )
“A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories, some unlike anything you’ve read before. Wilson displays a marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity…Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review) )
“Has some of the best writing I’ve seen in a long, long time. Kevin Wilson’s stories not only tunnel to the center of the earth—they tunnel through the intricacies of family, love and the dark places of the human soul.” (Hannah Tinti, author of THE GOOD THIEF )
“Kevin Wilson writes fiction that moves so quickly from twisted hilarity to strange, delicate beauty that you might not notice—until it’s too late—that your heart is good and broken. This collection is like the spontaneous combustion one story in it describes: urgent, amazing, and on fire.” (Alix Ohlin, author of THE MISSING PERSON and BABYLON AND OTHER STORIES )
These superb, often audacious stories rework the ordinary into surreal yet hauntingly plausible worlds, and we emerge seeing ourselves with fresh, if somewhat nervous, clarity.” (Ben Fountain, PEN/Hemingway award-winning author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara )
“Kevin Wilson’s stories show us a world that is both real and full of illusion…He forces us to look at our own lives in a new and slightly off-kilter way.” (Ann Patchett, bestselling author of BEL CANTO )
