Belly Up: Stories by Rita Bullwinkel

Belly Up is a story collection that contains ghosts, mediums, a lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible warden, and carnivorous churches. Throughout these grotesque and tender stories, characters question the bodies they’ve been given and what their bodies require to be sustained.

Ranging greatly in their length, form and tethering to a recognisable reality, the stories of BELLY UP collectively question the boundaries of gender, death, and coupling, and all of the supplies, attention, and nutrients that people consume to subsist. Familiar moments – a receptionist becomes fascinated with harp music; two high school girls debate taking gym class; a bored beauty corresponds with an inmate – pivot into unusual investigations of corporeality and selfhood.  Fantastical stories – Floridian zombies have a living child; a self-aware snake who eats children has an identity crisis; prisoners perform magical surgeries – find humanity and warmth in the dark grotesque.

Full of the variety of the world, in an abundance of resonant sentences and images, Belly Up is the more deeply striking because it is also uncannily natural, observant, and compulsively readable

'These stunning stories . . . 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

Paperback

Publication: 9 May 2024, Daunt Books
ISBN: 9781914198748
Extent: 244 pages