Brandi Wells

Brandi Wells is the author of Please don’t be upset (Tiny Hardcore Press). She is managing editor of the Black Warrior Review and a web editor at Hobart. Her fiction appears in Salamander, Mid-American Review, 14 Hills, Alice Blue and other journals.


what are you reading now

Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet


classic you’ve been meaning to read

Middlemarch. I bought it at the Goodwill, opened it when I got home and it immediately fell apart. But I feel determined.


last book to make you laugh out loud

Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote. I mean, I hated the book, but I laughed anyway.


book you borrowed and never returned

Dune. Sorry Trey.


most challenging book you’ve ever read

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. That was almost 700 pages of Stein. That’s a lot of Stein.


strangest dream involving a book, writer, or literary character

I have a recurring dream where I’m drowning Yeats in my bathroom sink. He’s always a tiny, slimy man and he won’t fight back.


book you’ve planted on a coffee table to impress someone

I don’t know if I’ve planted books, but I have hidden them. You know, all those boxcar children books. There is something completely fucked and kind of frightening about those boxcar children.


if you could subscribe to only one literary journal

Caketrain. I have never disliked an issue of Caketrain.


best thing you’ve read online recently

I just read and loved “Mrs. Wiggins’ altocumulus undulatus asparatus” by Kevin McIlvoy in the March issue of The Collagist.


most anticipated upcoming release

I keep waiting for Lily Hoang’s Unfinished to be released in black and white so I can afford it.


recommended reading list:


Books That Make Me Want to Embrace Hate


- How the Days of Love & Diphtheria by Robert Kloss

- The Tracey Fragments by Maureen Medved

- The Wavering Knife by Brian Evenson

- Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

- Vengeance Is Mine! by Mickey Spillane

- The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders

- Sula by Toni Morrison

- Vera and Linus by Jesse Ball and Thordis Bjornsdottir

- The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson

- Mercury by Ariana Reines