A dazzling debut collection of ten powerful, feminist, and queer short stories from bestselling author Zoe Whittall

In Wild Failure, characters encounter feelings of shame, desire, attachment, and disconnection as they find themselves navigating their way through bad decisions, unusual situations, and fraught relationships.

In “Oh, El” a dominant woman can’t stop herself from toying with the tender heart of her co-worker. The title story, “Wild Failure” is a doomed love story between an agoraphobic and a wilderness hiker. In “Half Pipe” a teen girl’s heterosexual ambivalence results in chaos at a skate park. A group of idealistic roommates find themselves the subject of a true crime podcast in “Murder at the Elm Street Collective House.” In “The Sex Castle Lunch Buffet” a woman reflects on her brief stint at a 90s strip club after she learns of the death of a former client.

Wild Failure is replete with Whittall’s perceptive humor and acute insights into human nature. It’s also a dynamic and vibrant collection of poetic fiction that contend with the meaning of desire in a world that devalues femininity and queerness.

ZOE WHITTALL’s third novel, The Best Kind of People is currently being adapted for limited series by director Sarah Polley. It was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, named Indigo’s #1 Book of 2016, a Heather’s Pick and a Best Book of the Year by the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life and the National Post. Her second novel, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, won a Lambda Literary Award for trans fiction and was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her debut novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize and is being adapted for screen. In 2014 Whittall sold her first sitcom, Breaking, to CTV, and recently optioned the half-hour comedy Wellville to CBC. She has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy Award–winning comedy Schitt’s Creek and the Baroness Von Sketch Show, for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award. She has written three volumes of poetry, most recently an anniversary reissue of The Emily Valentine Poems, about which Eileen Myles said, “I would like to know everything about this person.” Zoe Whittall was born on a sheep farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, has an MFA from the University of Guelph and has called Toronto home since 1997. 

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“These stories are vividly detailed and almost unbearably relatable, packed with full-blown characters on the verge of revelation and transformation.” — Lynn Coady, author of Watching You Without Me

“Phenomenal. Zoe Whittall writes with the sharpness, heat and radiance of a master storyteller, a master of the human heart. Entanglement, atonement, betrayal, phobia, lust, love, forgiveness––in Wild Failure, Whittall compresses entire worlds into the most alive of sentences. I was stunned and I was transfixed by this page-turner of a collection. Wild Failure finds us at our most lost and our most found; it blazes then shimmers leaving its wise, daring, beautiful mark long after the last word.” — Claudia Dey, author of Daughter

“These beautiful stories of longing and connection vibrate with emotional honesty and sharp detail. A dirty, tender collection.” — Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)fertility

“Absorbing and wrenchingly intimate, with a rare balance of wit and tenderness.” — Jenny Fran Davis, author of Dykette

“Ten short short-stories with striking details that left me passionately wistful for every shitty apartment and unhealthy relationship I ever had. Each one feels like your funniest friend read the diary of the hot barista you daydream about and now you’re breathlessly being told everything. It’s like being on ten first dates, but really, it’s ten eighth dates, when they drop the facade and unload the best awful things they’ve done. Rigorously humane, funny and forgiving - you know these characters well.” — Donovan Woods, musician

“Nobody invites you into the center of a story, a scene, a romance or a betrayal quite like Zoe Whittall. Wild Failure is unwaveringly intimate and distinct, full of stories that remind you there is company to be found in your hardest and most beautiful places.” — Chase Joynt, filmmaker, writer, video artist, actor, and professor

“How do I describe this short story collection that distracted me from my cooking well enough that I almost burned my dinner? It’s like Zoe Whittall cut these slice-of-life stories with a serrated knife.” — Catherine Hernandez, author and screenwriter of Scarborough the book and film