WIN $150 GIFT VOUCHERS: ALADDIN'S GOLD
Wil Weitzel received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from New York University Writers Workshop in Paris. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, EPOCH, Kenyon Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He received a New York City Emerging Writers Fellowship at the Center for Fiction and won the Washington Square Review Flash Fiction Award. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been a finalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize. His creative nonfiction was recognized as notable in The Best American Essays, and he is currently at work on a novel focused on the natural world and connecting with other species.
Wil Weitzel has left me no choice but to burden him with comparisons to Chekov, Hemingway, and Munro. His stories are that kind of brilliant. Set in myriad vividly drawn geographic and socio-economic landscapes, his vast array of fully realized characters runs the gamut: young and old; innocent and evil; cross-species; predators and prey; brutal and tender; achingly sympathetic and unforgivably loathsome. The deliberate, intentional cruelties people inflict on one another (and on animal life) juxtaposed with inherent decency and kindness join forces to expose the mind, heart, and blood of humanity and the inhumanity of humankind. The prose is exquisite, but these stories are anything but pretty. Rather, they are the stuff of great literature: unflinching and beautiful. -Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits For Food
