Belly Up (A Strange Object)

The stories of Belly Up occupy the space between the familiar and the surreal. Through fiercely intelligent prose and quotidian moments, a receptionist becomes fascinated with harp music, two high school girls debate taking gym class and a bored beauty corresponds with an inmate. Fantastical stories filled with ghosts, mediums and carnivorous churches find humanity and warmth in the grotesque. The characters and voices of Belly Up, whether a sentient snake who eats children or a widow building a life without her husband, are all seeking to find a way to cope with the bodies they’ve been given and the bodies they must encounter. 

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

"Bullwinkel's delightful, passionate stories of disturbance and worried words have the best kind of frenetic energy." - Deb Olin Unferth

Rita Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in Tin House, Conjunctions, 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 at McSweeney's. She live in San Francisco. This is her first book.

Amina Cain is the author most recently of the short story collection Creature, out with Dorothy, a publishing project, and a forthcoming novel in 2019 from FSG. Her essays and short stories have appeared in n+1, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Full Stop, Vice, the Believer Logger, and other places. She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB. You can find Amina online at Gentle Nights. Find her online at: http://aminacain.com/

Elizabeth Ziemska is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Interfictions: 2, Strange Horizons, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Pushcart Prize XLI, and has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She is the author of Mandelbrot the Magnificent and lives in Los Angeles. Follow her at:https://twitter.com/Ziemska