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Reading and discussion at 5:30 p.m. | Book signing at 6:15 p.m. Join CMA Writer-in Residence Ray McManus for a celebratory launch of Julia Elliott’s new book, Hellions (Tin House), one of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025. From the acclaimed author of The Wilds comes an electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, reveling in the collision of the familiar with the wildly surreal. With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic and from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly. Grab a glass of sparkling wine, buy a book, and join McManus and Elliott for a reading and conversation followed by a book signing courtesy of All Good Books. Free.
Julia Elliott is also the author of the aforementioned story collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch (both from Tin House). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, Granta (online), and the New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Elliott teaches English and women’s and gender studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and five hens.
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Praise for Hellions:
"A genius at the short-story form, Julia Elliott achieves new highs with the astonishing Hellions. Beautiful, visceral, surprising stories, both wild and dangerous, with a Southern twang but universal appeal. Elliott is an Angela Carter for our times. One of my favorite collections of the past few years." — Jeff VanderMeer, author of Absolution
"Julia Elliott’s fiction is its own country. Every sentence drips and unsettles, every character lusts and schemes, every landscape is alien and forbidding. But there is something eerily familiar pulsing underneath the wildness—the way your waking life snakes through the logic of your dreams. I am obsessed with these lush, feral stories." — Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"Jeff VanderMeer called Elliott an Angela Carter for our times, and he’s absolutely right. Elliott’s fiction blends folklore and fairy tale, reality and strangeness, the surreal and the mundane to make dazzling mobiles of oddity—and her new collection is shaping up to be her most curious to date. From medieval convents to small Southern towns, Elliott’s protagonists make her strange worlds seem vibrantly real." — Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
"A stultifying rural South Carolina provides the backdrop for these intoxicating, fantasy-tinged stories. . . . Elliott’s rich and magical landscape will pull readers in." — Publishers Weekly
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Columbia Museum of Art, 1515 Main Street,Columbia, South Carolina, United States
