Out There

'Extraordinary . . . Folk is a dazzling talent' Karen Joy Fowler

'Wonderfully weird' Daily Mail

A woman uses dating apps to find a partner, despite the threat posed by 'blots', artificial men more interested in stealing data than dating. A sculptor, trapped in a skyscraper restaurant when a violent coup erupts below, creates a perfect model of the town as it is destroyed. A curtain of void obliterates the world at a steady pace, leaving one woman to decide with whom she wants to spend eternity.

Haunting and darkly inventive, the stories in Out There deftly combine science fiction and horror to uncover an unforgettable vision of the absurdity of life in the digital age.

'The literary love child of Kafka and Camus and Bradbury penning episodes of Black Mirror' Chang-Rae Lee, author of Native Speaker

Out There is for readers who consider body horror to be a love language. True romantics will swoon either despite or because of the gore that accompanies these sharp, affable stories . . . Folk's stories have been compared to Shirley Jackson's, and this is most apparent in the way Folk balances her horror with humour. New York Times Book Review
Kate Folk's short stories are wonderfully weird; playfully pushing the possibilities of plotlines towards the uncanny, creepy and off-kilter, they have a seam of dark humour that illuminates the grotesquery with an unnerving beauty Daily Mail
A wonderful absurdist collection that explores the vagaries of human connections Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Tightly constructed and spectacularly mind-bending stories that ingeniously pair everyday challenges and outlandish predicaments, ranging from hilarious to terrifying. Folk writes with unnerving matter-of-factness as she veers into Poe- and Shirley Jackson-like horror or turns to the poignantly fantastic in the mode of George Saunders or Kelly Link. Booklist (starred review)
Kate Folk will be compared to Carmen Maria Machado and Julia Armfield - there are wonderful similarities in the sheer force of her creations, but she's very much her own writer. These stories are funny, scalding and, sometimes, breathtakingly beautiful. -- Sarah Davis-Goff, author of Last Ones Left Alive
Explores a gendered territory somewhere in the borderlands of magical realism, weird horror, sci-fi and literary fiction about jaded relationships Los Angeles Times
Fifteen extraordinary, through-the-looking-glass tales, containing locked rooms, demanding houses, embodied Russian bots, revolution, and relationships -- all delivered with a side of menace. Wonderfully weird and weirdly wonderful, Folk is a dazzling talent -- Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
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. -- Chang-Rae Lee, award-winning author of The Surrendered
Disturbing, alluring, dazzling and creepy, Out There is a riveting collection that keeps you enthralled with every page. -- Claire North, bestselling author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Kate Folk's stories inhabit otherworldly realms where exquisite language and beguiling characters excavate the very nature of love and existence. -- Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son
Kate Folk is 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. -- Lisa Locascio, author of Open Me
The stories in this stunning debut are funny, fearless, and moving portraits of life shaped by the ever-widening shadow of technological progress. Folk's imagination is uncanny and arresting. Out There expertly captures the all-too-human experience of longing for lives we may never inhabit, and the final story is a chilling and tender portrait of love that will stick with you long after you finish the book. -- Isle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians
The lucid, unsettling landscapes in Out There bring our own world into chilly focus through an exquisitely distorted lens. Each one of these amazing stories is a masterclass in eeriness and perception. Kate Folk's imagination is on fire. -- Aysegül Savas, author of White on White
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 Out There goes onto my shelf of favorite collections. -- Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble
Wry, riveting, and ambitious, Out There is one of those rare collections that manages to be both brilliantly inventive and emotionally resonant. Folk's tilted worlds are hilarious and unsettling-they sit squarely in the spaces where anxiety and exhilaration collide. Full of unforgettable voices and gleeful, exacting prose, this is a sharp and stylish debut from a wildly gifted writer -- Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

Kate Folk is the author of the short story collection Out There. She has written for publications including The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Granta, McSweeney's, and Zyzzyva. She's received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.

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