Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, a collection of stories by Kevin Wilson
from Ecco/Harper Perennial

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.

“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

“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…Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts: new ideas.”
-Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review), 2/15/2009

“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

“…captivating debut…a lively landscape with rich and twisted storytelling…fresh and darkly comic”
-Publishers 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

“Wilson’s little time-bomb fables have a surrealist zip, like miniature Magritte paintings come to life.”
Washington Post – 7/8/2009

“A dazzling and important new writer.”
-Ann Patchett, best-selling author of Bel Canto and Run

“Kevin Wilson is the unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers. Bow your heads! Jesus Christ is this guy good.”
-Owen King, author of We’re All In This Together