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Belly up : stories

Bullwinkel, Rita2024

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Summary

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.