Julia Elliott presents HELLIONS
Schedule
Sat, 02 May, 2026 at 03:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779 | Sylva, NC
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Julia Elliott will visit City Lights on May 2nd at 3pm to present her new short story collection, HELLIONS. “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
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. Hellions is a genre-bending collection of stories that ranges like a feral dog from medieval Europe to the heart of the contemporary South and on into strange, tech-mediated futures.
In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript, pining for Christ’s love. During a long, muggy July in rural South Carolina, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of mothers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods. With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott’s Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly.
Julia Elliott is the author of the story collection Hellions, a TIME book of the month and a Southern Book Prize finalist. Her collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, was chosen by Kirkus, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, and Electric Literature as one of the Best Books of 2014. She also published the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, and The New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award and two Pushcart Prizes, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and six hens.
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Where is it happening?
3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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