“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. A thrilling debut from a writer so agile and subtle in her terms that, like Walter Abish and Kathryn Davis, 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
   winner of the National Book Award

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”