Wild Failure: Stories

by Zoe Whittall Narrated by Hillary Huber

Overview

A dazzling debut collection of ten powerful, feminist, and queer short stories from bestselling author Zoe Whittall

“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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/24/2024

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. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Phenomenal . . . Whittall compresses entire worlds into the most alive of sentences.”—Claudia Dey, author of Daughter

“These beautiful stories of longing and connection vibrate with emotional honesty and sharp detail. . . . A dirty, tender collection.”—Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)fertility

“Rigorously humane, funny, and forgiving—you know these characters well.”—Donovan Woods, musician

“How do I describe this short story collection that distracted me from my cooking and almost caused me to burn my dinner? It’s like Zoe Whittall cut these slice-of-life stories with a serrated knife whose blade is sharp enough that we see an expert storyteller in her element and dull enough that the wounds of her characters hurt so good.”—Catherine Hernandez, author of Scarborough

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160528335
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/20/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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