Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories [Paperback]

Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. Grand Stand-In is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies stand-ins for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in Blowing Up On the Spot, a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.

Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.

Wilsons little time-bomb fables have a surrealist zip, like miniature Magritte paintings come to life.Geniously surreal but affecting short stories about spontaneous combustion, Scrabble and angst at all ages. RIYL (Read if you love): George Saunders.Turns the genre of Southern fiction on its head&Wilsons fully realized characters keep the stories grounded.A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories, some unlike anything youve read before. Wilson displays a marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity&Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.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.Kevin Wilson is the unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers.... Jesus Christ is this guy good.Kevin Wilsons stories show us a world that is both real and full of illusion&He forces us to look at our own lives in a new and slightly off-kilter way.Im drawn to particular authors, folks like George Saunders and Stacey Richter and Kevin Wilson&who I know are going to kick my ass.Has some of the best writing Ive seen in a long, long time. Kevin Wilsons stories not only tunnel to the center of the earththey tunnel£3