Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York. She is the author of the novel Oval (2019) and the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022).

Oval was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was described in the New Yorker as a “finely observed dystopian mirror.” Death by Landscape is a series of reflections on the role of literature in the age of extinction, which the New York Times called “a whirlwind tour of thought that develops into a philosophy.”

Elvia's essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in publications like Frieze, Bookforum, n+1, Granta, The Paris Review online, BOMB, 4Columns, The White Review, Mousse, The Nation, The Atlantic, WIRED and The New York Review of Books.

She's a contributing editor at e-flux Journal, teaches in the MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence and Cornell, and works as an editorial strategist for several clients. She has won some grants and awards. For literary inquiries, please contact Claudia Ballard at WME.

Pics

“Bizarre weather. Unprecedented economic disparity. Artists employed by corporations as consultants. And the ultimate work of art: Oval, a pill that increases generosity. This unforgettable debut novel asks questions of empathy and power on every scale—from bodies to bureaucracies—to create an unsettling portrait of the future of Berlin.”

Soft Skull (US)
Peninsula (UK)
Zona42 (Italy)
Secession (Germany)

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Various starred reviews and most-anticipated lists.

Reviews in the New Yorker, Bookforum, Observer, The Nation, The Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books , NPR , Hyperallergic, Art in America, Frieze, Monopol, Exberliner, The Stinging Fly, Full Stop, Book Slut, C Mag, Taz, Der Freitag

“A fascinating near-future exploration of relationships, sustainability, and power. An extraordinarily accomplished debut novel.” ―Jeff VanderMeer
“Deeply weird and unsettlingly hilarious.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“At the core of this seductive, acute, superbly-contemporary update of mid-period J.G. Ballard lies a deep-beating, deep-dreaming heart.” —Jonathan Lethem
“With wit and precision, Elvia Wilk pinpoints the moment when neoliberalism metastasizes into something far more sinister.” ―Tom McCarthy
“So good, so dark, so funny, so cruelly smart about where we are and where we’re going.” ―Shelley Jackson
“J. G. Ballard meets William Gibson meets Jeff VanderMeer. An up-to-the-minute story about the twilight zones of corporate design, aesthetics, pharmacy, and bioengineering.” ―McKenzie Wark
“A fabulous biopunk hybrid that's not quite like anything else I've ever read.” ―Ned Beauman
“Don DeLillo's White Noise updated for 2019 minus the satire of academia plus a layer of millennial discontent.” ―Molly Young

In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self. Various starred reviews and most-anticipated lists.

Soft Skull (US)
add editore (Italy)

“Superb...fiery...elegant and powerful. This one packs a punch.”
―Publishers Weekly

“A whirlwind tour of thought that develops into a philosophy...a tangible sense of questing.”
―The New York Times

“In these essays, it is the lucidly observed idiosyncrasies of everyday life, so profoundly strange, that expand our sense of the beautiful and the possible.”
―The Nation

“Death by Landscape is an attempt, essentially, to shift the cultural vibe... it aims to rebuild readers’ sense of responsibility to the world we live in by seeking unexpected possibilities, play, and even pleasure in what we read.”
―The Atlantic

“TLDR: You should read it. You will want to reread it. Maybe you will want to kiss, lick, and cry over it; to eat it, break it down and re-form it into new ideas, new writing.”
―LIBER Review

“This book is amazing. It brought me back to sanity, space, and language.”
―Jenny Hval

“Elvia Wilk is one of the most exciting essayists working today. I love this book.”
―Catherine Lacey

“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.”
―Jonathan Lethem

“It’s rare to come across an essay collection that veers so far into the wilds of weirdness, only to return from these distant outposts with something so deeply honest, vulnerable, and close. Wilk is a writer of exceptional talent, but it is the sheer scale and scope of her curiosity that makes these essays not only unforgettable but intellectually rearranging. Death by Landscape pulls off a wondrous bit of alchemy—it takes what might otherwise be terminus ideas, sites of conclusion, and transforms them into conduits of passage, a way of reassessing what it means to be human in this age of endless unmooring.”
―Omar El Akkad

“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

“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 piece 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

“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

“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 L. Evans

“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

“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

“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

“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 larp, 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