Death by Landscape

A AnOther Magazine Most Anticipated Book

“Perhaps ‘essays’ is too slight a description for Death by Landscape, which strikes me as the stealth memoir of a supertaster of the present moment—a citizen of our suffering species who has chosen storytelling as her armor for survival. Whatever you call it, Wilk’s book strengthens me to go on with the essential work, and makes me awfully eager for her next.” —Jonathan Lethem

"Erotics of compost, vampires, medieval nuns, and solarpunk. Wilk’s 'fan nonfiction,' examines the works of Anne Carson, Octavia Butler, Michelle Tea, and more to probe the lines and shapes of 'weird fiction' in the face of extinction and all its urgency and anxieties. At the heart of it are questions of how to tell stories that center the Earth as opposed to humans, that help us grapple with the end of the world, and that help us see and be with the dark of it all." —Snigdha Koirala, Lit Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
 
"With evocative clarity and intuitive rigor, Elvia Wilk's Death by Landscape guides us through a troubled terrain criss-crossed by that most uncanny of entities, 'nature.' This is writing that uniquely extends the tradition of speculative nonfiction, delineating a new constellation of culture and climate that ultimately points to the nebulous horizon of human being itself." —Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation

“Elvia Wilk has written a guidebook and a philosophy for living in a precarious world, in essays that are searching and funny, self-assured and unguarded all at once. With each chapter Wilk directs her telescopic focus on plants and rot, mysticism and black holes, female embodiment and trauma, weaving together seemingly disparate topics with an intelligence that recalls the best of Mark Fisher and Wayne Koestenbaum. Reading Death by Landscape, I feel terrified and exalted, expanded, in awe.” —Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

“Elvia Wilk's learned and bracing essays distribute the mind out beyond the stubborn habits and enclosures of our 'humanities'—out past hack plots or boundaries assigned to gender or species—where it can expand into subsoil or outer space or corpuscle in narratives weird enough to reflect another human/non-human social life.” —Keller Easterling, author of Medium Design and Extrastatecraft

“Elvia Wilk reports on psychic borders, the lines drawn between earth and earthling, plant and steward, healthy and sick. She finds false binaries we hadn’t even thought to count and asks the human to find its humanity, gently but without wavering. Brilliant and swift, as she always is.” —Sasha Frere-Jones, musician and writer

“Wilk reads the world like an insect reads a garden; her approach is sensory and kaleidoscopic, buzzing beyond manicured surfaces to get at the fertile, loamy rot beneath everything from black holes and science fiction dystopias to martyred saints and larpers. Beautifully brainy, bug-eyed, and weird.” —Claire Evans, author of Broad Band
 
“I love these weird essays. They do best what weirdness always wants to do: defamiliarize the world around us so that we may better see where we’ve ended up, where we might be going, and who—or what—has been chasing after us all this time. Weirdness, Elvia Wilk writes, ‘provides a sort of methodology for reading stories that lead toward the black hole.’ The stuff (places, people, things) that resists description, challenges our fictions and non-fictions. A black hole is impossible to enter without warping your reality, death beyond death: Wilk scrapes the event horizon and gazes at last into the spooky abyss.” —Andrew Durbin, author of Skyland and MacArthur Park
 
“Elvia Wilk's brilliant interlinked essays show why fiction matters in a time of climate catastrophe, species devastation, and radical inequality. From the old weird to the new, sci-fi to cli-fi, medieval women's mysticism to larps, Wilk gives us a roadmap through unfamiliar pasts and unsettling presents, pointing toward unpredictable futures that fiction—in its multiple, shifting, compostable forms—enables us to imagine. Treading the fine, impossible line between dystopia and utopia, between trauma, its repetition, and its working through, Wilk doesn't pretend fiction can fix everything, but she does insist—and she shows—that the effects of fiction ‘are myriad small explosions with far-reaching fragments,’ fragments that help us grapple with what life means and how best to live it while we can.” —Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia
 
“Elvia Wilk is that cool person I want to hang out with at the end of the world. Too smart to despair and too curious to not re-examine even the most studied phenomena (nature, trauma, ambition . . .) until they’re no longer familiar and are catching new light. Death by Landscape is expansive, athletic, weird, and funny.” —Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread and Rise of the Necrofauna

A AnOther Magazine Most Anticipated Book

“Perhaps ‘essays’ is too slight a description for Death by Landscape, which strikes me as the stealth memoir of a supertaster of the present moment—a citizen of our suffering species who has chosen storytelling as her armor for survival. Whatever you call it, Wilk’s book strengthens me to go on with the essential work, and makes me awfully eager for her next.” —Jonathan Lethem

"Erotics of compost, vampires, medieval nuns, and solarpunk. Wilk’s 'fan nonfiction,' examines the works of Anne Carson, Octavia Butler, Michelle Tea, and more to probe the lines and shapes of 'weird fiction' in the face of extinction and all its urgency and anxieties. At the heart of it are questions of how to tell stories that center the Earth as opposed to humans, that help us grapple with the end of the world, and that help us see and be with the dark of it all." —Snigdha Koirala, Lit Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
 
"With evocative clarity and intuitive rigor, Elvia Wilk's Death by Landscape guides us through a troubled terrain criss-crossed by that most uncanny of entities, 'nature.' This is writing that uniquely extends the tradition of speculative nonfiction, delineating a new constellation of culture and climate that ultimately points to the nebulous horizon of human being itself." —Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation

“Elvia Wilk has written a guidebook and a philosophy for living in a precarious world, in essays that are searching and funny, self-assured and unguarded all at once. With each chapter Wilk directs her telescopic focus on plants and rot, mysticism and black holes, female embodiment and trauma, weaving together seemingly disparate topics with an intelligence that recalls the best of Mark Fisher and Wayne Koestenbaum. Reading Death by Landscape, I feel terrified and exalted, expanded, in awe.” —Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

“Elvia Wilk's learned and bracing essays distribute the mind out beyond the stubborn habits and enclosures of our 'humanities'—out past hack plots or boundaries assigned to gender or species—where it can expand into subsoil or outer space or corpuscle in narratives weird enough to reflect another human/non-human social life.” —Keller Easterling, author of Medium Design and Extrastatecraft

“Elvia Wilk reports on psychic borders, the lines drawn between earth and earthling, plant and steward, healthy and sick. She finds false binaries we hadn’t even thought to count and asks the human to find its humanity, gently but without wavering. Brilliant and swift, as she always is.” —Sasha Frere-Jones, musician and writer

“Wilk reads the world like an insect reads a garden; her approach is sensory and kaleidoscopic, buzzing beyond manicured surfaces to get at the fertile, loamy rot beneath everything from black holes and science fiction dystopias to martyred saints and larpers. Beautifully brainy, bug-eyed, and weird.” —Claire Evans, author of Broad Band
 
“I love these weird essays. They do best what weirdness always wants to do: defamiliarize the world around us so that we may better see where we’ve ended up, where we might be going, and who—or what—has been chasing after us all this time. Weirdness, Elvia Wilk writes, ‘provides a sort of methodology for reading stories that lead toward the black hole.’ The stuff (places, people, things) that resists description, challenges our fictions and non-fictions. A black hole is impossible to enter without warping your reality, death beyond death: Wilk scrapes the event horizon and gazes at last into the spooky abyss.” —Andrew Durbin, author of Skyland and MacArthur Park
 
“Elvia Wilk's brilliant interlinked essays show why fiction matters in a time of climate catastrophe, species devastation, and radical inequality. From the old weird to the new, sci-fi to cli-fi, medieval women's mysticism to larps, Wilk gives us a roadmap through unfamiliar pasts and unsettling presents, pointing toward unpredictable futures that fiction—in its multiple, shifting, compostable forms—enables us to imagine. Treading the fine, impossible line between dystopia and utopia, between trauma, its repetition, and its working through, Wilk doesn't pretend fiction can fix everything, but she does insist—and she shows—that the effects of fiction ‘are myriad small explosions with far-reaching fragments,’ fragments that help us grapple with what life means and how best to live it while we can.” —Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia
 
“Elvia Wilk is that cool person I want to hang out with at the end of the world. Too smart to despair and too curious to not re-examine even the most studied phenomena (nature, trauma, ambition . . .) until they’re no longer familiar and are catching new light. Death by Landscape is expansive, athletic, weird, and funny.” —Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread and Rise of the Necrofauna