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OUT THERE

Kate Folk

Stories

The fifteen wickedly entertaining stories in this collection inject the absurd into the everyday to skewer life in the modern age--for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, George Saunders, and Ottessa Moshfegh.
Marked by thrillingly weird circumstances, indelible characters, and caustic wit, the stories in Kate Folk's debut collection are perfectly pitched for the madness of our current moment. A ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the scene of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing earth's dwindling inhabitants to decide whom they want to spend eternity with. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by "blots," preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection. Wildly imaginative, genre-bending, and eerily prescient, OUT THERE depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together, they herald an exciting new voice in the tradition of speculative literary fiction. Kate Folk's short stories and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The New Yorker, One Story, McSweeney's, ZYZZYVA, New York Times Magazine, Granta, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Conjunctions, and Tin House, among others. She has a BA from NYU and an MFA from the University of San Francisco and in addition to the Stegner program, she has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Kate lives in San Francisco, where she is an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, a college English instructor, and an editor at Joyland.
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Published 2022-03-29 by Random House

Comments

...a formidable writer, a literary swordsmith of feline dexterity, very dark and very funny, equally at home in the magisterial dark and the relentless glare of truth.

Kate Folk's stories inhabit otherworldly realms where exquisite language and beguiling characters excavate the very nature of love and existence.

An assortment of stories so sharp and ingenious you may cut yourself on them while reading, like a drawer full of the most beautiful knives. Kate Folk's OU THERE goes onto my shelf of favorite collections.

UK: Hodder UK

One could fancy Kate Folk as the literary love child of Kafka and Camus and Bradbury, if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of "Black Mirror," but that still wouldn't capture the blazing originality and exhilarating weirdness of her writing. Wondrously perverse, often creepy and hilarious, and always sneakily heart-breaking, from the moment you read these tales you'll know you're in the presence of a singularly brilliant vision, one that burns off the scrim of our normal-seeming human customs and operations to reveal the utter bizarreness of this existence. Out There, it turns out, lies very much within.

After multiple bidders, we officially closed on Kate Folk's TV series deal with 20th Century Fox, with Kate as an Executive Producer and co-writing with Sharon Horgan (of the hit British sitcom "Catastrophe"). It's for the two slightly similar stories in the collection, "The Void Wife" and "Big Sur."

Kate Folk made an audio recording of her New Yorker short story "Out There" for The Writer's Voice for The New Yorker podcast Read more...

Kate Folk's stories inhabit otherworldly realms where exquisite language and beguiling characters excavate the very nature of love and existence.

Folk debuts with a wonderful absurdist collection that explores the vagaries of human connections... The whole perfectly balances compassion and caustics, and the author has an easy hand blending everyday terror with the humor that helps people swallow it. Folk impresses with her imagination as well as her insights.

Folk's shocking, grim, funny, and tender stories deliver astringently incisive perceptions of human longing and contradictions. Read more...