Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York. She often contributes to publications like Frieze, Mousse, Metropolis, and Artforum. From 2012 to 2016 she was a founding editor at uncube magazine, and from 2016 to 2018 she was the publications editor for transmediale and a contributing editor at Rhizome. Currently, she's a contributing editor at e-flux journal and writes a monthly column on ethical quandaries for Monopol magazine. She received a masters at the New School for Social Research and has taught at the University of the Arts Berlin, Eugene Lang College, and City College of New York. She is the recipient of a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers grant and is a 2020 fellow at the Berggruen Institute.
DEATH BY LANDSCAPE: Essays
“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
Elvia Wilk’s first nonfiction collection, DEATH BY LANDSCAPE: Essays, encompasses recent and previously unpublished work and offers a singular snapshot of our complicated age. Each brilliant and formally inquisitive piece gives us the generous gift of Elvia's perspective on narrative and storytelling and weird fiction. Throughout, Elvia asks what the role of art and literature is today, when the human can no longer be thought of as the center of the universe and the world moves at warp speed. While it deftly negotiates the worlds of politics, science fiction, and technology in pieces like “The Protests in Hong Kong” and “Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?”, this provocative book is somehow also about love, connection, and plants.
BUY THE BOOK
OVAL
“A fascinating near-future exploration of relationships, sustainability, and power. An extraordinarily accomplished debut novel.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of BORNE and ANNIHILATION
*Long listed for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize*
*One of Vulture’s “Best Books of 2019”*
*One of Cosmopolitan’s “Best Books of June 2019*
*One of Thrillist’s “33 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer”*
*One of NYLON’s “35 Great Books To Read This Summer”*
*One of The Millions’ “Most Anticipated This Month: June 2019”*
*One of The Brooklyn Rail’s “Ten Books from Small Presses You Should Read This Summer”*
*One of Book Riot’s “7 of the Buzziest Beach Reads of the Year”*
*One of Outside’s “5 Absorbing Books to Get You Through Midsummer”*
*One of domino’s “Twenty new books to add to your list”*
OVAL is a deeply imaginative work of literary fiction that reflects the way Berlin has changed and paints a portrait of this culture-capital today and soon. In the near future, a dire lack of housing afflicts Berlin, where buildings are being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” but only serve to make the city unaffordable. A young German-American couple, Anja and Louis, have moved into an experimental eco-community on an artificial mountain, The Berg, in the urban center—yet another “eco-friendly” initiative run by a corporation called Finster. They’re offered a home rent-free in exchange for keeping quiet about the seriously malfunctioning infrastructure of the experimental house.
But when Louis’ mother suddenly dies, the couple’s frustrations with Finster are thrown into relief. After Louis returns to Berlin from the funeral, Anja is convinced he has changed. He becomes newly idealistic, throwing himself into a secret project at the NGO where he works. Anja is horrified to discover what Louis has invented: a pill called Oval that artificially induces empathy in the user. Louis is certain that if he can introduce the drug into the Berlin club scene, he can unlock latent generosity within the culture class and finally remedy the income disparity that has made Berlin so unlivable. Speculative fiction in line with Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne, this memorable debut styles and recreates the city, prompting us to consider an unsettling and yet all-too-plausible future in which imminent change becomes undeniable.