- Featured Magazines
- Let's Get Cooking!
- News, Politics, and Business
- Lifestyle Magazines
- Popular Magazines
- All Magazines
- See all magazines collections
1 of 1 copy available
“Absorbing and wrenchingly intimate, with a rare balance of wit and tenderness.”—Jenny Fran Davis, author of Dykette
In Wild Failure, characters encounter feelings of shame, desire, attachment, and disconnection as they find themselves navigating their way through bad decisions, unusual situations, and fraught relationships.
In “Oh, El,” a dominant woman can’t stop herself from toying with the tender heart of her co-worker. The title story, “Wild Failure,” is a doomed love story between an agoraphobic and a wilderness hiker. In “Half-Pipe,” a teen girl’s heterosexual ambivalence results in chaos at a skate park. A group of idealistic roommates find themselves the subject of a true crime podcast in “Murder at the Elm Street Collective House.” In “The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet,” a woman reflects on her brief stint at a nineties strip club after she learns of the death of a former client.
Wild Failure is replete with Whittall’s perceptive humor and acute insights into human nature. It’s also a dynamic and vibrant collection of poetic fiction that contend with the meaning of desire in a world that devalues femininity and queerness.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
August 20, 2024 -
Formats
-
Kindle Book
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780593499924
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780593499924
- File size: 2926 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
June 24, 2024
Whittall (The Fake) delivers a dynamic collection focused on women’s desire and discomfort. In “Half-Pipe,” 15-year-old Morgan gets drunk with her best friend Sandy and has no memory the next day of having sex with a skateboarder named Tyler. Sandy urges Morgan to go out with Tyler and she spends another night with him, only to wake up and find him having sex with her. After she agrees to be Tyler’s girlfriend, she discovers a video online of her first sexual encounter with him, and tries to rationalize the existence of the footage. In “A Patch of Bright Flowers,” up-and-coming queer writer Julia hits on bestseller Bridie at a conference. Unlike Julia’s work, Bridie’s contains no trace of her lesbian identity, and the two discuss the differences between their books and the limits of the marketplace. In “The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet,” Alix reminisces about her stint as a stripper 20 years earlier after seeing an obituary notice for one of her regulars. The memories cause a spike in her anxiety, which she keeps from her therapist, remembering what a coworker said at the club on her first day: “If you fake it, you’ll eventually feel it, your body won’t understand the difference.” Whittall’s raw depictions of her characters’ emotions hit hard. These stories will linger in readers’ minds. -
August 1, 2024
In her first collection of short stories, Whittall (The Fake, 2023) explores desire, sexuality, and agency in all of their messy and chaotic glory. The opening story, "Half-Pipe," sets the tone, centering on the friendship between two teenage girls--bad girl Sandy and naive Morgan--and the fallout from a drunken night at a skate park. In "More Holy," a queer filmmaker in her thirties with a weakness for "hard-won masculinity" reconnects with the older boy she was attracted to as a young teen in a church youth group; and in "The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet," a woman struggling with anxiety reads the obituary of a man who was a regular during her time as a stripper in the 1990s. In each story, Whittall invites readers into her characters' minds, sharing their traumas, anxieties, triumphs, and devastations. These are women who struggle--with sexuality, with desire, with bleak or unpleasant reality--and the stories are visceral, immediate, unsparing, and powerful. Whittall's brutally honest, unapologetically queer collection will resonate with readers who appreciated Miranda July's All Fours (2024).COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
-