Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel - Softcover

Wells, Kellie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661708 ISBN 13: 9781573661706

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 2012

Synopsis

Not only the story of a colossus of a woman living in Kansas, Fat Girl, Terrestrial is also a meditation on God, treachery, and blind love.
 In Kingdom Come, Kansas, a town from which children once mysteriously disappeared, there lives a giant woman. Wallis Armstrong is not a pituitary mutant or a person battling a rare medical condition; she’s just an improbably large woman ill at ease in a world built for shrimps. Paradoxically, Wallis builds miniatures of crime scenes, and her specialty is staged suicides. She constructed her first diorama as a child when a boy in her fourth-grade class went suddenly missing. Wallis’s brother, Obie, believes the only explanation for his sister’s amplitude is that she is the incarnation of God on Earth, and he is her one true ardent disciple. Until he too disappears.
 Kellie Wells’s story of Wallis’s odyssey through this tight-fitting world is a churlish meditation on the existence and nature of God as well as an exploration of the treachery of childhood and the destructive nature of the most blindly abiding kind of love: that of a love-struck brother for a big sister, a disciple for an unwilling prophet, and a bone-weary god for a savage and disappointing flock.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Like the wondrous giantess at its heart, this is a book whose contours manage to contain--wickedly, soul-stirringly, in prose that makes your head spin and your heart beat faster--an entire universe, while at the same time forcing you to confront the wages of such impossible embodiment.  It's tempting to say that in Kellie Wells the Brothers Grimm meet Raymond Chandler, but then you'd also have to include Virginia Woolf and William Blake, Julian of Norwich and maybe even Harpo Marx.  Plus did I mention that Fat Girl, Terrestrial also happens to be a real page-turner?"--Kathryn Davis

About the Author:

Kellie Wells is the author of a collection of short fiction, Compression Scars, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and a novel, Skin. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers and the GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including the Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Fairy Tale Review, and Prairie Schooner, and was selected by Kevin Brockmeier for inclusion in Best American Fantasy. She currently lives in Tuscaloosa, where she teaches in the MFA Program at The University of Alabama.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1573661708
• ISBN 13: 9781573661706
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 392