Kevin Wilson (1) (1978–)
Author of Nothing to See Here
For other authors named Kevin Wilson, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Image credit: www.wilsonkevin.com/
Works by Kevin Wilson
Associated Works
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (2012) — Contributor — 85 copies, 4 reviews
Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone's First Decade (2014) — Contributor — 13 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Wilson, Kevin
- Birthdate
- 1978
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Florida (MFA)
- Organizations
- University of the South
- Relationships
- Leigh Anne Couch (wife)
- Short biography
- Kevin Wilson is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel The Family Fang (Ecco, 2012), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017), and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019) as well as the collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Rivendell, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of the South.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Sewanee, Tennessee, USA
- Places of residence
- Sewanee, Tennessee, USA
- Map Location
- USA
Members
Reviews
I should start off by saying that I'm not sure I would have loved this book as much as I did if I had read it rather than listened to it. Humor doesn't always translate across a page, but with a skilled reader employing a pitch-perfect dead pan delivery, the twisted humor of this one really came alive on audio.
Lillian is employed by her high school friend, Madison, to care for Madison's two step-children, a pair of twins who spontaneously combust when angry or agitated. Yes, yes, it's show more ridiculous, but somehow Wilson makes it work. And in these two "weirdos," Lillian recognizes outsiders like herself, ones who will never quite fit in or be accepted. Their relationship is really lovely to see develop, and Lillian's snarky humor, intelligence, and self-deprecation endeared her to me. There is also a lot in the novel about class, gender roles, and privilege, so it's much richer thematically than what I expected.
I think some readers didn't quite get the humor, or couldn't get past the bizarre premise, and the book fell flat for them. I wasn't sure it would be my cup of tea, but the audio was available from the library so I decided to give it a whirl. I am so glad I did - Lillian is a character that will stay with me for a long time. show less
Lillian is employed by her high school friend, Madison, to care for Madison's two step-children, a pair of twins who spontaneously combust when angry or agitated. Yes, yes, it's show more ridiculous, but somehow Wilson makes it work. And in these two "weirdos," Lillian recognizes outsiders like herself, ones who will never quite fit in or be accepted. Their relationship is really lovely to see develop, and Lillian's snarky humor, intelligence, and self-deprecation endeared her to me. There is also a lot in the novel about class, gender roles, and privilege, so it's much richer thematically than what I expected.
I think some readers didn't quite get the humor, or couldn't get past the bizarre premise, and the book fell flat for them. I wasn't sure it would be my cup of tea, but the audio was available from the library so I decided to give it a whirl. I am so glad I did - Lillian is a character that will stay with me for a long time. show less
I couldn’t believe how deeply personal this novel felt when I heard the author describe his reasons behind writing it. It was such a great exploration of the meaning of art, its impact, an artist’s control over it, and its ripple effect on culture. It was also very much the story of awkward teenagers trying to figure out who they are.
“The chaos of our daughter, so lovely and beautiful, I would always be grateful for it. How she required us to keep living, to keep moving forward just so show more she didn’t leave us in her dust.”
“We made the poster so we can still control it I think.
That’s not how art works.” show less
“The chaos of our daughter, so lovely and beautiful, I would always be grateful for it. How she required us to keep living, to keep moving forward just so show more she didn’t leave us in her dust.”
“We made the poster so we can still control it I think.
That’s not how art works.” show less
Come for the gimmick, stay for one touching, and one puzzling, relationship. The gimmick of course is the children who periodically burst into flame, which doesn't do them any harm. The story doesn't try to explain how this could be, making it magical realism instead of science fiction. Also making it explainable as a mere metaphor for how children can be difficult. What, children can be difficult? It's true!
The puzzling relationship is between Madison, the two children's step-mother, and show more Lillian, her roommate for half a year of ninth grade at an elite boarding school. Madison is beautiful and was raised to be at home with power and wealth, and is now married to the kids' father, an important Senator, but has trouble forming relationships and has no real friends. Except Lillian? Lillian was a scholarship kid at the school before being expelled, taking the fall for Madison's actions after Madison's arrogant father wrote Lillian's uncaring mother a large check, sending Lillian back to a life of poor schools and dead end jobs. This relationship has all sorts of subtexts - a massive and uncomfortable power imbalance, hidden and repressed sexuality, dysfunctional families, thwarted ambitions.
The touching relationship is between these kids and Lillian. The children's mother, a paranoid recluse, has killed herself and tried to kill them as well. Their father, the Senator, has no feeling for them and wants them to be hidden away. They catch on fire. Safe to say, they've got some issues. Madison asks Lillian to leave behind her barely functional life to care for them in a guesthouse on their massive estate. It shouldn't work out but it does, and the kids and Lillian find love and redemption in each other. And it's actually written pretty well.
There's less done with the flammable aspect of the children than I was expecting, so I got a different book than I thought I was about to read, but it's an entertaining and solid read. show less
The puzzling relationship is between Madison, the two children's step-mother, and show more Lillian, her roommate for half a year of ninth grade at an elite boarding school. Madison is beautiful and was raised to be at home with power and wealth, and is now married to the kids' father, an important Senator, but has trouble forming relationships and has no real friends. Except Lillian? Lillian was a scholarship kid at the school before being expelled, taking the fall for Madison's actions after Madison's arrogant father wrote Lillian's uncaring mother a large check, sending Lillian back to a life of poor schools and dead end jobs. This relationship has all sorts of subtexts - a massive and uncomfortable power imbalance, hidden and repressed sexuality, dysfunctional families, thwarted ambitions.
The touching relationship is between these kids and Lillian. The children's mother, a paranoid recluse, has killed herself and tried to kill them as well. Their father, the Senator, has no feeling for them and wants them to be hidden away. They catch on fire. Safe to say, they've got some issues. Madison asks Lillian to leave behind her barely functional life to care for them in a guesthouse on their massive estate. It shouldn't work out but it does, and the kids and Lillian find love and redemption in each other. And it's actually written pretty well.
There's less done with the flammable aspect of the children than I was expecting, so I got a different book than I thought I was about to read, but it's an entertaining and solid read. show less
Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up
The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here comes an exuberant, bighearted novel about two teenage misfits who spectacularly collide one fateful summer, and the art they make that changes their lives forever.
Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another sad summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist show more who has just moved into his grandmother’s unhappy house and who is as lonely and awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
The posters begin appearing everywhere, and people wonder who is behind them. Satanists, kidnappers—the rumors won’t stop, and soon the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread far beyond the town. The art that brought Frankie and Zeke together now threatens to tear them apart.
Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge—famous author, mom to a wonderful daughter, wife to a loving husband—gets a call that threatens to upend everything: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that? And will what she knows destroy the life she’s so carefully built?
A bold coming-of-age story, written with Kevin Wilson’s trademark wit and blazing prose, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is a nuanced exploration of young love, identity, and the power of art. It’s also about the secrets that haunt us—and, ultimately, what the truth will set free.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Nothing to See Here was a solid 3.5-star read for me. It was entertaining and I got a few moments of real emotional involvement. I didn't think I'd go looking for more of Author Wilson's work but the Universe had other ideas...Ecco offered me the DRC and, being game as well as greedy, I hopped on it like a hen on a junebug.
Frankie Budge is a teenaged girl with a serious boredom problem. She's a Coalfield, Tennessee, girl who's smart enough to be a novelist in training and bored enough to do anything to stave off the screaming meemees. She's got triplet brothers whose lives will clearly end in tears, prison sentences, and severe emotional damage. Her father's left his family for another woman, and her mother...cruises...she lets Frankie be her own weird self because, well, triplet boys on the way to prison require more than a single working mother actually has to give. Yay for Frankie! Then she meets Zeke, a new kid with no friends.
Zeke's dad was a horndog, too. (Is this something Author Wilson knows about from personal experience, one must ask oneself.) Zeke apparently decompensated all over the guy in the middle of his office. Well, that's what his mom says...he can't remember any of it. Oh, and this is important: He's so freaked about the whole nightmare that he's decided to rename himself "Zeke" short for his middle name, Ezekiel. He and his mom are staying in Coalfield, where she was from. And that's how the match met the gas....
Y'all remember the 1980s Satanic Panic era? All that horror, all those lives ruined...well, in her gawky attempt to connect with this boy she likes, Frankie made the error to end all errors...she showed him a Xerox machine her brothers had stolen from the high school's shed. With toner and paper and everything...and she lets Zeke fix it, using the loveliest phrase for a paper jam I've ever heard: "like the machine had done origami"...so thus begins one of the major Satanic panics moved all the way up in time to 1996.
Their use for the photocopier is to make an art project (after Frankie uses it as an excuse to cop her first-ever kiss from a boy who's never kissed a girl either) of a poster—a drawing Zeke does after she writes “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us” on a piece of paper. Then the Xerox comes into play...she comments in her narrative about them being kids from Nowheresville and never having heard of Andy Warhol so they were inventing this new thing together...and, after making a bunch of them, Frankie puts them up all over Coalfield.
Hijinks quite horribly ensue.
The inspiration of some older teens to play off this mysterious and compelling artwork, using it for their own ends, and the horrors that any powerful thing can call forth when it's anonymous and unclaimed, break the entire town. Frankie and Zeke are kids. They're way too scared to face up to the consequences (some truly terrifying) of their innocent actions. And that is where I realized I was a lot more involved with this story than I ever was with the first book of his I read. I circled back and read "On Writing Now Is Not The Time to Panic", Author Wilson's introductory story of how this book has been moving inside him for a long time. He spoke directly from his heart, revealed his genuine grief that finally summoned this book into the world after the decades of growing, and I was utterly changed. A story I'd thought was pretty good became a moving, honest act of love for a past and a life he was no longer living. And that made my pleasure multiply many-fold.
What it means to my old-man self to see someone as young as Author Wilson contend with the doomed promise of nostalgia, to confront the power of a past one can never reach but must always reach for...well, that spoke to me. That made me feel I was heard and understood by a complete stranger who couldn't pick me out in a line-up of Boomers. I am validated by this evidence of my sad, wistful knowledge of the ghost-hand of the past clutching with steel talons in someone young enough to be my child.
Then what the hell happened to that fifth star, it's fair to ask. Welllll...I'm really not sure it's fair to say, he said, glancing at the ever-present truncheons of the Spoiler Stasi. I'm not a big fan of the way the pressure to dredge up her past with Zeke, now going by his first name again, entered Frankie's life, and the things it led her to do were understandable but frankly disturbing to me. I felt she was violating boundaries for selfish reasons. It's not like she needed to do something she did the way she did it...the knowledge could've been gained less invasively...but here we are. I've only docked a quarter-star and I'm pretty sure the sales won't suffer because one no-name blogger was squicked out at some stuff that most of y'all (who never had your boundaries utterly disregarded by a woman) won't notice.
I'm still glad I read the book, you can see. I'm especially delighted by a piece of mother-daughter healing that spoke loudly to me. And you know, that is more than enough of a gift to take the slight sting of imperfection off my eyes. show less
The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here comes an exuberant, bighearted novel about two teenage misfits who spectacularly collide one fateful summer, and the art they make that changes their lives forever.
Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another sad summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist show more who has just moved into his grandmother’s unhappy house and who is as lonely and awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
The posters begin appearing everywhere, and people wonder who is behind them. Satanists, kidnappers—the rumors won’t stop, and soon the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread far beyond the town. The art that brought Frankie and Zeke together now threatens to tear them apart.
Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge—famous author, mom to a wonderful daughter, wife to a loving husband—gets a call that threatens to upend everything: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that? And will what she knows destroy the life she’s so carefully built?
A bold coming-of-age story, written with Kevin Wilson’s trademark wit and blazing prose, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is a nuanced exploration of young love, identity, and the power of art. It’s also about the secrets that haunt us—and, ultimately, what the truth will set free.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Nothing to See Here was a solid 3.5-star read for me. It was entertaining and I got a few moments of real emotional involvement. I didn't think I'd go looking for more of Author Wilson's work but the Universe had other ideas...Ecco offered me the DRC and, being game as well as greedy, I hopped on it like a hen on a junebug.
Frankie Budge is a teenaged girl with a serious boredom problem. She's a Coalfield, Tennessee, girl who's smart enough to be a novelist in training and bored enough to do anything to stave off the screaming meemees. She's got triplet brothers whose lives will clearly end in tears, prison sentences, and severe emotional damage. Her father's left his family for another woman, and her mother...cruises...she lets Frankie be her own weird self because, well, triplet boys on the way to prison require more than a single working mother actually has to give. Yay for Frankie! Then she meets Zeke, a new kid with no friends.
Zeke's dad was a horndog, too. (Is this something Author Wilson knows about from personal experience, one must ask oneself.) Zeke apparently decompensated all over the guy in the middle of his office. Well, that's what his mom says...he can't remember any of it. Oh, and this is important: He's so freaked about the whole nightmare that he's decided to rename himself "Zeke" short for his middle name, Ezekiel. He and his mom are staying in Coalfield, where she was from. And that's how the match met the gas....
Y'all remember the 1980s Satanic Panic era? All that horror, all those lives ruined...well, in her gawky attempt to connect with this boy she likes, Frankie made the error to end all errors...she showed him a Xerox machine her brothers had stolen from the high school's shed. With toner and paper and everything...and she lets Zeke fix it, using the loveliest phrase for a paper jam I've ever heard: "like the machine had done origami"...so thus begins one of the major Satanic panics moved all the way up in time to 1996.
Their use for the photocopier is to make an art project (after Frankie uses it as an excuse to cop her first-ever kiss from a boy who's never kissed a girl either) of a poster—a drawing Zeke does after she writes “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us” on a piece of paper. Then the Xerox comes into play...she comments in her narrative about them being kids from Nowheresville and never having heard of Andy Warhol so they were inventing this new thing together...and, after making a bunch of them, Frankie puts them up all over Coalfield.
Hijinks quite horribly ensue.
The inspiration of some older teens to play off this mysterious and compelling artwork, using it for their own ends, and the horrors that any powerful thing can call forth when it's anonymous and unclaimed, break the entire town. Frankie and Zeke are kids. They're way too scared to face up to the consequences (some truly terrifying) of their innocent actions. And that is where I realized I was a lot more involved with this story than I ever was with the first book of his I read. I circled back and read "On Writing Now Is Not The Time to Panic", Author Wilson's introductory story of how this book has been moving inside him for a long time. He spoke directly from his heart, revealed his genuine grief that finally summoned this book into the world after the decades of growing, and I was utterly changed. A story I'd thought was pretty good became a moving, honest act of love for a past and a life he was no longer living. And that made my pleasure multiply many-fold.
What it means to my old-man self to see someone as young as Author Wilson contend with the doomed promise of nostalgia, to confront the power of a past one can never reach but must always reach for...well, that spoke to me. That made me feel I was heard and understood by a complete stranger who couldn't pick me out in a line-up of Boomers. I am validated by this evidence of my sad, wistful knowledge of the ghost-hand of the past clutching with steel talons in someone young enough to be my child.
Then what the hell happened to that fifth star, it's fair to ask. Welllll...I'm really not sure it's fair to say, he said, glancing at the ever-present truncheons of the Spoiler Stasi. I'm not a big fan of the way the pressure to dredge up her past with Zeke, now going by his first name again, entered Frankie's life, and the things it led her to do were understandable but frankly disturbing to me. I felt she was violating boundaries for selfish reasons. It's not like she needed to do something she did the way she did it...the knowledge could've been gained less invasively...but here we are. I've only docked a quarter-star and I'm pretty sure the sales won't suffer because one no-name blogger was squicked out at some stuff that most of y'all (who never had your boundaries utterly disregarded by a woman) won't notice.
I'm still glad I read the book, you can see. I'm especially delighted by a piece of mother-daughter healing that spoke loudly to me. And you know, that is more than enough of a gift to take the slight sting of imperfection off my eyes. show less
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