Kellie Wells


Home	Publications	Reviews/Interviews	Bio/Contact	Happenings

fat girl

Order at FC2
Order at Powell's
Order at Amazon

"Fat Girl, Terrestrial is proof. Giants still walk the earth and Kellie Wells is one of that visionary breed. Wells has always stood at ease in the tall company of Flannery O'Connor and John Kennedy Toole. But in this novel her tsunami of gorgeous lingua Americana engulfs every art form. It is music and image, soaring idea and grounded intellect, hurtling drama, spirit and flesh, and every known angle--from delicate to brutal--of comedy. Magnificent."

—Katherine Dunn
author of Geek Love

“Like the wondrous giantess at its heart, this is a book whose contours manage to contain—-wickedly, soul-stirringly, in prose that makes your head spin and your heart beat faster—-an entire universe, while at the same time forcing you to confront the wages of such impossible embodiment. It’s tempting to say that in Kellie Wells the Brothers Grimm meet Raymond Chandler, but then you’d also have to include Virginia Woolf and William Blake, Julian of Norwich and maybe even Harpo Marx. Plus did I mention that Fat Girl, Terrestrial also happens to be a real page-turner?”

—Kathryn Davis
author of The Thin Place

“Even in a crowded field, it is a rare pleasure to come across a prose stylist like Kellie Wells, whose intellect and language bid one another beautifully to a dance. She dares to be at play in the most unsettling questions of her day. Surely when the present generation of writers shakes down to its unique and irreplaceable voices, Kellie Wells will be one of them.”

—Jaimy Gordon
    author of Lord of Misrule and winner of the National Book Award

"Kellie Wells—a 21st century Dorothy Gael—has written a new mythology for our time. It glows with brains, heart, and courage. I deeply admire this book."

—Kate Bernheimer,
    World Fantasy Award winning editor of My Mother She Killed Me,
    My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales


“By turns achingly poignant and downright hilarious, rendered in prose as supple and surprising as it is consistently brilliant, these stories take us into a world of angels and grotesques, of grace notes and grave truths, of the lost and, finally, the found.” —Ellen Akins author of Hometown Brew “Distinguished by a compressive force born from invention and intensity rather than economy, Kellie Wells's aptly titled Compression Scars is a memorable debut. The writing is consistently fresh and often beautiful, though for Wells beauty is a by-product. The primary function of her language is incantation—necessary to effect the alchemical transformations that inform each story.” —Stuart Dybek author of The Coast of Chicago “Slyly comic yet deeply felt, Kellie Wells's marvelous fiction embraces the sacred weirdness of everyday life. These are magical stories, in every sense of the word, by a writer with a conjurer's feel for the hidden compartments, death-defying escapes, and lighter-than-air levitations of language.” —Peter Ho Davies author of Equal Love	a Novel Flyover Fiction Series University of Nebraska Press Series Editor: Ron Hansen “From within the deceptively commonplace bodies of the inhabitants of a small Kansas town with the deceptively homespun name of What Cheer, Kellie Wells unleashes the clamorous, resistless, marvelous voice of our world's collective unconscious, the language of ecstasy and despair in all its manifold registers. Reading *Skin* is like finding yourself inside one of the great medieval paintings, every last detail (a sycamore tree, a TV, a firefly, a set of dentures in a glass, a meadowlark) perfectly rendered, and exploding with celestial meaning.” —Kathryn Davis author of The Thin Place

All content © 2012 by Kellie Wells