Wild Failure: Short Stories

In Wild Failure , bestselling novelist Zoe Whittall contends with the meaning of desire for both intimacy and danger in a world that questions the validity of femininity and queerness.

In "Oh, El," a dominant woman can't stop herself from toying with a tender heart. In "Half-Pipe," a teen girl's ambivalence about heterosexuality gets her in trouble at a skate park. The title story, Wild Failure, is a doomed love story an agorapic and a wilderness hiker tricker in a passionate relationship that might ruin them both—if a mountain lion doesn’t kill them first. Living collectively in a rental house, a group of bisexual roommates find themselves the subject of a true-crime podcast in "Murder at the Elm Street Collective House." In "The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet," a femme reflects on her brief stint at strip club ago when she learns of the death of a regular client.

Whittall's characters navigate shame, attachment and disconnection in this collection of outsider stories inspired by the new narrative movement and hybrid literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s. Through playful prose and dark humor, Whittall challenges we mean by a beautiful life in this latest addition to the genre of outlaw literature.