Reviews and Praise for Nothing to See Here
“Wilson is a remarkable writer for many different reasons, as demonstrated by his quirky novels, Perfect Little World (2017) and The Family Fang (2011), and tons of short stories. One of his greatest strengths is the ability to craft an everyday family drama and inject it with one odd element that turns the story on its head. He’s done it again here, writing once more about family but with some most unusual children and a particularly charming narrator.”
-Kirkus Reviews, 9/1/19
“Wilson turns a bizarre premise into a beguiling novel about unexpected motherhood…Wilson captures the wrenching emotions of caring for children in this exceptional, and exceptionally hilarious, novel.”
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“The novel is a love letter to the weirdness and difficulties of children and parenting…another story [from Wilson] of a family that is as delightfully bizarre as it is heartfelt and true.”
-Library Journal
“Slighter in scale than Wilson’s previous novels, this one is powered, like his strange and funny short stories, by an element of fantasy. Lillian tells the story, revealing immediately that she’s another of Wilson’s normal extraordinary protagonists..She fills the book with her wry humor and large, embracing heart as she ponders the love of friendship and the love of family and then acts on what she discovers.”
-Booklist
Reviews and Praise for Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine
“Wilson triumphantly returns to short stories, the medium of his first book, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (2009), ruminating once more on grief, adolescence, and what it means to be a family…Evocative, compassionate, and exquisitely composed stories about the human condition.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review), 6/1/18
After two dazzling realistic satires, The Family Fang (2011) and Perfect Little World (2016), Wilson proffers his second story collection. Saying it’s as good as Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (2009) doesn’t do it justice…Wilson never moralizes, much less sensationalizes, any predicament he sketches; rather, he makes us feel and wonder at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
–Booklist (starred review)
There’s a lot of Salinger in Wilson’s writing — the wit, the vulnerability and the cosmic sadness. And, these new stories of Wilson’s are something else; they’re funny, raw and beautiful and, for sure, they killed me.
–NPR Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan, 8/13/18
In the world of Wilson’s darkly funny short stories, children and deer die, and unhappy, helpless people drink and do irresponsible things. Wilson (Perfect Little World) shows people managing as best they can: trying to survive video game zombies when the rest of their life is too horrible to fix (“Scroll Through the Weapons”), helping selfish grown children because no one else would love them enough to do so (“Housewarming” and the title story), and coping with the horror of adolescence by making horror movies (“The Horror We Made”)…The rest stick with the reader and show a terrible world made less so, sometimes, by human contact, even though humans were usually the problem in the first place.
–Publishers Weekly
“This marks the first short story collection by Wilson in a decade, and it’s a welcome event, seeing as how Wilson is a master of the form. Within each story, Wilson shows his sharp with and expansive empathy for the weirdest corners of the human condition.”
–Nylon, 5/23/18
“Tolstoy would have approved: In the short story collection Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, Kevin Wilson finds an impressively wide-ranging assortment of punishments to make 10 different families uniquely unhappy. Yet it’s a thrill to read these stories, proving yet again that even bleak material can be exciting in the hands of a great storyteller.”
–Bookpage, 8/1/18
“Kafkaesque absurdism, Southern Gothic, domestic dysfunction, sci-fi playfulness—throw it all in a blender, and what comes out will look something like Kevin Wilson’s new story collection, Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine. A decade has passed since the publication of his first story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. Wilson’s gift for the form has aged well…Wilson’s acerbic prose style is chatty and loose, punctuated with moments of startling lyricism and insight. His penchant for quirky characters and offbeat conceits makes the mundane feel fresh and the pitiable sympathetic and endearing.”
–Chapter 16, 8/6/18
Reviews and Praise for Perfect Little World
“Wilson is such an inventive and witty writer, that it was only after I’d finished Perfect Little World and was no longer caught up in the story, that I realized how many ideas he raises here, how many kinds of family arrangements he scrutinizes, among them biological, chosen, nuclear, communal, broken and bandaged. The utopian Infinite Family Project may be flawed from the get-go, but Wilson’s “perfect little world” of a novel pretty much lives up to its title.”
–NPR (Maureen Corrigan), 1/30/17
“It’s a novel you keep reading for old-fashioned reasons — because it’s a good story, and you need to know what happens. But you also keep reading because you want to know what a good family is. Everyone wants to know that.”
–New York Times (John Irving), 1/30/17
“Wilson writes beautifully about parents and children, blending the keen social observation of Tom Perrotta or Meg Wolitzer with the deep, affectionate understanding for oddballs that has always been Anne Tyler’s territory. There’s sweetness, even when the book’s humor gets dark… Above all, although “Perfect Little World” pokes fun at the idea that anyone can plan for the ideal life, Wilson seems to suggest that by loving the people around us, however imperfect they or we may be, we can come closest to getting it right.”
–Boston Globe (Kate Tuttle), 2/3/17
“The author of The Family Fang invents another unusual family structure for his sweet and thoroughly satisfying second novel…Wilson grounds his premise in credible human motivations and behavior, resulting in a memorable cast of characters. He uses his intriguing premise to explore the meaning of family and the limits of rational decision making.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Stellar. . . . Compelling. . . . Realer and wiser and sadder and eventually reassuring about human nature than dozens of other novels.”
–Booklist, 11/1/16 (Starred Review)
“A moving and sincere reflection on what it truly means to become a family.”
–Kirkus Reviews, 11/15/16 (Starred Review)
“…moving novel about love, parenting, and the families we create for ourselves.”
–Library Journal, 10/1/16
“Kevin Wilson’s second book has a premise so offbeat and complicated that it’s difficult to explain but seems completely natural when you’re in the midst of it. The sheer energy of imagination in Wilson’s work makes other writers of realistic fiction look lazy.”
–Newsday (Marion Winik), 1/20/17
“Wilson resisted sensationalism and apocalyptic tropes. Instead, he’s written something quite genuine and powerful. Unexpectedly, I was moved.”
–Longreads (Emily Perper), 9/27/16
Reviews and Praise for The Family Fang
“[A] bizarre, mirthful debut novel…leavened with humor.”
–Publishers Weekly, 4/4/2011 (Starred Review)
A fantastic first novel that asks if the kids are alright, finding answers in the most unexpected places.”
–Kirkus Reviews, 4/15/2011 (Starred Review)
“Don’t be surprised if this becomes one of the most discussed novels of the year.”
-Booklist, 6/1/2011 (Starred Review)
“A highly engaging and imaginative first novel…Wilson has a gift for characterization and dialogue.”
–Art in America, 6/20/2011
“The Family Fang packs a wallop…”
-The New York Times, 8/3/2011
“It’s such a minty fresh delight to open up Kevin Wilson’s debut novel, The Family Fang, and feel the revitalizing blast of original thought, robust invention, screwball giddiness…a family story that’s out-of-the-box, and funny, and, also, genuinely moving. Wilson’s inventive genius never stops for a rest break.”
-NPR’s Fresh Air, 8/8/2011
“Inventive and hilarious…This is complex psychological ground, and the 32-year-old Mr. Wilson navigates it with a calm experience that his tender age shouldn’t allow.”
-The Wall Street Journal, 8/6/2011
“A delightfully odd story…Wilson has an infectious fondness for the ridiculous and a good ear for muffled exasperation.”
-The Washington Post, 8/10/11
“[A] wildly original new novel…The Family Fang is bizarre, unique, unerringly comic, breathtakingly wonderful. Wilson doesn’t just create a strikingly peculiar family; he also makes you adore it, even when it’s at its worst. (And that’s often.) The Family Fang is first and foremost a comic masterpiece, but Wilson has managed to inject a hint of universality.”
-Miami Herald, 8/21/11
“Wilson’s writing has a Houdini-like perfection, wherein no matter how grim the variables, each lovely sentence manages to escape with all its parts intact…Wilson keeps his plot moving swiftly enough to keep readers absorbed. And those sentences are really something.”
-Boston Globe, 8/21/11
“Kevin Wilson combines wit, intelligence and a brilliant understanding of the cracks in unconditional love with his debut novel, The Family Fang… Surprising twists from a high-concept world embedded in plot so rich and complex it can only be defined as mastery make The Family Fang a 2011 absolute must-read. Kevin Wilson is free to take a bow, and provide the encore.”
-The Examiner.com, 8/19/11
“Wilson writes with the studied quirkiness of George Saunders or filmmaker Wes Anderson.”
–Entertainment Weekly, 8/3/11
“this is a hugely likable book – funny, colorful, and memorable…”
-BookBrowse, 8/3/11
“Wilson…tells his madcap story with straight-faced aplomb, highlighting the tricky intersection of family life and artistic endeavor. All fiction readers will enjoy this comic/tragic look at domesticity. Recommended.”
-Library Journal, 3/1/2011
“His writing is filled with a certain tart social satire that partakes of what might be called the Southern Gothic sense of humor, dark but very, very funny.”
-Washington Independent Review of Books
“The Family Fang is the sort of perfectly idiosyncratic thing that comes along only ever so often. . . . This book should succeed spectacularly.”
-New York Journal of Books
The Family Fang is a comedy, a tragedy, and a tour-de-force examination of what it means to make art and survive your family. Like everything else Kevin Wilson does, I have never seen anything like it before. The best single word description would be brilliant.”
-Ann Patchett, best-selling author of Bel Canto, The Magician’s Assistant, and Run
“The Family Fang is such a unique work that turning each page feels like unearthing a discovery. This is the kind of novel you fall in love with: tender-hearted, wonder-filled, a world all its own. And Kevin Wilson is the kind of writer you want to hug just for writing it, if only to be close to such talent, so rare and beautiful and big.”
-Josh Weil, author of The New Valley
“Kevin Wilson commands the cavalry riding around the vastly important Army of the Loopy. This Army protects the less important Army of the Earnest. He rides slashing from the Implausible to the Plausible, and from there quickly to the Necessary and on to the True. The command of this ride is wicked, clean, and correct. The Family Fang will appear Coenized out of Hollywood but you should catch them here first.”
-Padgett Powell, author of Edisto, Aliens of Affection, and The Interrogative Mood
“It’s The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’d call The Family Fang a guilty pleasure, but it’s too damn smart. Here, finally, is a much needed reminder that astute fiction can still be a total blast.”
-Hannah Pittard, author of The Fates Will Find Their Way
Reviews and Praise for Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
“The detonating qualities of strong emotion appear in several stories, but Wilson is equally preoccupied with the absurdity of his imagined modern world…Wilson’s true gift is for depicting the dangers of strong, complex emotions…Wilson’s protagonists are frequently survivors, marred and changed from their exposure to the world. And when Wilson leaves behind his quirkiest conceits to focus on this more subtle material, his work shimmers…Wilson offers fabulous twists and somersaults of the imagination…As Wilson continues to dig into the texture and mystery of the world, his fiction should grow, like his best characters, in strange and remarkable ways.”
–New York Times Book Review, 4/5/2009
“Wilson animates his stories with a smart sense of humor. The lonely narrator of the title story majored in Morse code in college and bemoans the fact that all anyone wants to know how to tap out is “I love you” and “SOS”: “And if they were in a situation where they actually had to resort to using Morse code for help, well, they weren’t going to get it. They were going to die.” Humor is key to the clever-by-half stories, but it comes naturally to Wilson and his characters.”
–Time Out Chicago, 4/2/2009
“These 11 stories, by turns hilarious and elegiac, unfold like delicious, ripened dreams, and then abruptly explode into nightmares…Wilson does a spectacular job of maneuvering between voices and worlds, and in the process delivers a wide, convincingly erratic range of human emotion. To write such masterful stories takes a graceful eye, and, even more, a compassionate heart. Wilson has both. His disturbing, moving tales burrow their way under our skin and stay there.”
–Time Out New York, 4/6/2009
A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories, some unlike anything you’ve read before.
Wilson displays a marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity. One of the more resonant entries, “Grand Stand-In,” concerns a woman who joins a blossoming industry, playing grandmother to fractured families. Other stories sensitively document the emotional trials of adolescence: In “Mortal Kombat,” two teenaged boys do battle with their budding, bewildering sexuality, and in “Go, Fight, Win,” a reluctant young cheerleader muses that “sex seemed like chicken pox, inevitable and scarring.”
Hints of Southern Gothicism may be found among these pages. One story, “Birds in the House,” details a bizarre ritualistic contest whose winner will inherit an antebellum estate, while another, “The Shooting Man,” finds a young man named Guster obsessed with that most rural of spectacles, the traveling sideshow. More often, though, the author tells stories that ring true, and that feature innovative plots and the wit of indie comedy.
The best of the lot, “Blowing Up on the Spot,” concerns a man, Leonard, who works as a sorter at a Scrabble factory when he’s not coping with his suicidal brother, crushing on the girl who works in the candy shop and, well, worrying about what is, for him, the very real danger of spontaneous combustion.
Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.
–Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review), 2/15/2009
Wilson’s captivating debut collection paints an everyday world filled with characters obsessed by weird impulses. Whether it’s Guster, the narrator of “The Shooting Man,” who goes to great lengths to discover the secret of a sideshow performer whose trick is to shoot himself in the face, or the three bored college grads of the title story who compulsively dig a tunnel beneath their town, Wilson creates a lively landscape with rich and twisted storytelling. A few stories satirize the odd ways families react to tragedy, for example, “Grand Stand-in,” which revolves around an elderly woman hired by families who wish to avoid telling their children about an unforeseen death. Two of the best stories involve teens: in “Mortal Kombat,” two unpopular quiz bowl stars become enamored of a video game and each other, while “Go, Fight, Win,” features a cheerleader who prefers building model cars to the company of her schoolmates. While Wilson has trouble wrapping up a few stories (“Blowing Up on the Spot,” “The Museum of Whatnot”), most are fresh and darkly comedic in a Sam Lipsyte way.
–Publisher’s Weekly, 12/1/2008
“The world of Kevin Wilson’s “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” is at once familiar and new. The stories are set in a believable though exaggerated America of martial arts video games, Scrabble factories, sideshow acts, and spontaneous combustion. With their absurdist elements, these oddball tales recall the fiction of Steven Millhauser and George Saunders.”
–Boston Globe, 4/9/2009
“Kevin Wilson’s fiction feels like the work of a species entirely distinct from Aleksandar Hemon. For Slavic soul, substitute Southern anomie; in place of elegant continental modernism, put scattershot pop-culture mash-ups. Hemon writes characters who hate college football and cheeseburgers; Wilson depicts a puppy-love homosexual relationship that plays out within the mayhem of the video game “Mortal Kombat.” “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” gets under your skin, though; Wilson’s little time-bomb fables have a surrealist zip, like miniature Magritte paintings come to life.”
–The Washington Post, 7/8/2009
“Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, a debut collection of stories by Kevin Wilson, turns the genre of Southern fiction on its head. In the vein of Steven Millhauser, Wilson’s characters confront mundane problems in offbeat situations: an inheritance is decided by a complex game involving electric fans and origami birds; recent college grads avoid the “real world” by creating a network of tunnels under their neighborhood; and –in what could have been lifted from a Jan Svankmajer animation–the scandal of an extramarital affair is overshadowed by the couple’s grotesque baby, who was born with a full set of sharp, sparkling white teeth. Wilson creates nightmarish hyper-realities by literalizing familiar metaphors, like a 12-year-old whose love is so fiery that he actually ignites himself in an attempts to woo an older girl. While his bizarre plots can occasionally become distracting, Wilson’s fully realized characters keep the stories grounded.”
–Bomb Magazine (Editor’s Choice) – Number 107, Spring 2009
“Wilson’s stories, however, pass beyond whimsy, beyond satire, to the place where contemporary suburban fiction steps off into the abyss of unreality…Acute and uniformly unsettling, these fictions explore themes of loss and loneliness with fresh young insight, and occasionally with a faint rainbow at the end.”
Boston Globe (Short Takes), 4/19/2009
“…all the stories in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth are lush with imagination, humanity, and wit. It is a testament to Wilson’s talent how often he spins out a line that, though absurd, feels completely organic to the character thinking or saying it. Thanks to his slanted inventiveness, the conceptual fabric of Wilson’s tales always feels fresh, even foreign, while his characters, and the plights they plow through, are easily recognizable.”
–The Rumpus, 4/25/2009
Kevin Wilson’s stories in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth are…more the twisted offspring of George Saunders. But underneath the surrealism beats a pure and beautiful heart. His characters may be employed by companies that send out fake grandparents to real families, search for ‘Q’ tiles in a Scrabble factory or work for firms called Worst-Case Scenario Inc. All of them, however, radiate real tenderness and yearning.
–Louisville Courier-Journal, 8/22/2009
“With simple and succint prose, Wilson asks us to search for our place in the world, whether it be above or beneath the ground, and to recognize beauty and hope even in the “worst-case scenarios” of our lives. In doing so, he reminds us that nothing is unthinkable and everything is unpredictable.”
–Mid-American Review, Volume XXIX, Number 1
“Wilson uses a warped lens to examine the world from a fresh perspective in this darkly comic collection…Absurd and utterly engaging, Wilson’s stories often sneakily turn heart-breaking. He has a gift for tunneling through hilarious situations to lay bare the raw emotions that make his characters so very real. In the author’s bio, Wilson reveals his motivation: “…I wish that there were more artistic and noble reasons that I put pen to paper, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted people to kiss me and I had the unfounded notion that, if I wrote a good enough story, people would be compelled to make out with me.” Pucker up, Wilson — these stories are great.”
–77 Square, 3/27/09
“Kevin Wilson’s brilliant debut is full of characters you won’t be able to forget and wouldn’t want to even if you could, such as the circus act who gets shot in the face night after night after night. Lucky him for being a character in such a tender, one-of-a-kind book. Lucky us for having the chance to read it.”
—Brock Clarke, bestselling author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England
“If Kevin Wilson didn’t write so crisply, so subtly, with such a sure understanding of human nature and the ways of the world, I’d be tempted to say he was on something stronger than coffee when he wrote these stories—his imagination is that fertile and wonderfully offbeat. These superb, often audacious stories rework the ordinary into surreal yet hauntingly plausible worlds, and we emerge seeing ourselves with fresh, if somewhat nervous, clarity.”
—Ben Fountain, PEN/Hemingway award-winning author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
“Each of Kevin Wilson’s beautifully imagined stories crackles with originality. He can break your heart and mend it in the same line, and he can fold a universe of loss into the smallest, most delicate gesture. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is a refreshingly wild book, shot through with wicked humor and deep, affirming humanity, and it marks the arrival of a first-rank writer.”
—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi and Naming the World
“Kevin Wilson is the unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers. All the signs are there: the ability to realize the most bizarre situations with perfect control; the understanding that sometimes the saddest things are hilarious; and a willingness to always let his characters have their way, even as we pray for him to stop them. Bow your heads! Jesus Christ is this guy good.”
—Owen King, author of We’re All In This Together
“You have to be careful reading this book. Kevin Wilson writes fiction that moves so quickly from twisted hilarity to strange, delicate beauty that you might not notice—-until it’s too late—-that your heart is good and broken. This collection is like the spontaneous combustion one story in it describes: urgent, amazing, and on fire.”
—Alix Ohlin, author of The Missing Person and Babylon and Other Stories
“Kevin Wilson’s stories show us a world that is both real and full of illusion. One imagines the skies that sit over these towns are always a particularly vibrant shade of blue. The characters are people we almost know, and yet their lives are heightened, peculiar, both more dazzling and more tragic than our own. In turning the world not upside down but maybe twenty degrees on its side, he forces us to look at our own lives in a new and slightly off-kilter way. He is a dazzling and important new writer.”
—Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto and Run
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth has everything a reader needs: a Grandmother-for-hire, a baby with a full set of teeth, spontaneous combustion, and a cavalcade of Scrabble tiles, falling from the sky. It also has some of the best writing I’ve seen in a long, long time. Kevin Wilson’s stories not only tunnel to the center of the earth—they tunnel through the intricacies of family, love and the dark places of the human soul.
—Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and Animal Crackers