Deep Vellum Books is very excited to host Rita Bullwinkel in a discussion and reading of her first collection of stories, BELLY UP. The conversation will be moderating by journalist and literary translator Emily Gogolak.
About the Author
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of the story collection Belly Up (forthcoming from A Strange Object May 8th 2018). Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Tin House, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and her translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney's. She lives in San Francisco.
Emily Gogolak is a journalist and literary translator. A former editorial staffer at The New Yorker and a James Reston Fellow at the New York Times, she is now based in Austin. Her work has been supported by the Pulitzer Center and published by The New York Times, The Nation, The Village Voice, newyorker.com, Politico Magazine, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and in the anthology City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis. Her translation of Moonbath won a French Voices Prize and was published by Deep Vellum in 2017.
About the Book
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.
PRAISE FOR BELLY UP
“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
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