Fiction. BELLY UP is a story collection that contains ghosts, mediums, a
lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe
they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible
warden, and carnivorous churches. Throughout these grotesque and tender
stories, characters question the bodies they've been given and what
their bodies require to be sustained.
BELLY UP has been named a best of book pick by Nylon, Pop Sugar,
Bustle, the Millions, Hello Giggles, and more!
[BELLY UP] shows us that those 'unknown forces' do not have to remake
the entire world in order to be weird. Our littles lives are strange
enough.--Josephine Livingston, The New Republic
These surreal stories, suffused with humor and a casual tenderness,
feature the kind of writing that gets stuck inside your head, right
behind your eyes, so that, after you read it, everything about the way
you view the world seems colored and warped by this new lens.--Kristin
Iversen, Nylon Magazine
This collection, which absolutely heralds an exciting new talent, takes
place at a four-way crossroads between the mind and the body, the
reality we can know and the reality adjacent to our own, which we can
only glimpse through fiction.--Lauren Kane, The Paris Review
Bullwinkel's stories are fantastic and fabulist feats that (often)
address our messy, cumbersome bodies in thrilling and imaginative ways.
For example: in lieu of a bra, a man is hired to support a daughter's
breasts; a woman whose plastic surgeon, when fixing her eyes, leaves her
with a turkey neck (not literally but); twin brothers Gleb and Oleg,
surgeon and sculptor, live in a prison infirmary and perform a thumb
transplant. A compelling new voice.--Anne Yoder, The Millions
This searing and surreal debut short story collection (from one of my
favorite small presses) is an unusual and eerie story collection that
will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that their existence was
informed by the physical and the surreal.--Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle
These stunning stories take place in the spaces between ordinary objects
and events. They are mysterious, strange, and fearlessly funny in their
expression of human isolation, and they contain the existential
surprises of great literature. BELLY UP is a powerful debut by an
unusually gifted writer.--Lorrie Moore
At the intersection of the surreal and the real, Rita Bullwinkel has
carved out a unique space in which the mundane and the strange
cohabitate and sometimes frolic. The sharp, precise writing and careful
observations of the human condition in her excellent first collection
BELLY UP signal the debut of a major new talent.--Jeff VanderMeer
Bullwinkel's delightful, passionate stories of disturbance and worried
words have the best kind of frenetic energy.--Deb Olin Unferth
