Jen’s debut short story collection was published in 2018 as winner of Press 53’s Short Fiction Award.
Praise for Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses:
“In Earthly Delights and Other Apocalypses, Jen Julian takes your hand and leads you slowly into a world where ghosts lurk in houses full of strange objects, time and space expand and contract at will, and characters grapple with loss, survival, and what it means to be human. These stories, deliciously flavored with science fiction and Southern Gothic, are subtle and fine-wrought, each sentence pulling you forward to a beautiful or breathtaking conclusion. Every story in this collection is a gem.”
—EMILY CATANEO, author of Speaking to Skull Kings and Other Stories
“I love Jen Julian’s stories. They’re wise, weird, and steeped in an alluring darkness. They’re also deeply felt and resonate with true feeling. This is a stunning risk-taking debut and one that I’ll be returning to often.”
—BRYAN HURT, author of Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France
“This collection will take the top of your head off. Anglerfish. Sex Robots. Sensatones and stereograms. Time travel and Kairotic displacement disorder. Julian’s fiction has it all: the relevance of realism, the imaginative leaps of fabulism, the philosophical depth of S/F. These stories did more than entertain me—they actually changed my mind.”
—TRUDY LEWIS, author of The Empire Rolls: A Novel
“Earthy Delights is full of motherfucking crocodiles: good stories that shouldn’t be true, that couldn’t be true, that flagrantly violate both the rules of reality and the conventions of the genre(s) they inhabit, but that are nonetheless so well told that we’re forced, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge enjoins us, to suspend our disbelief in the patently absurd “facts” of the narrative to get at the tart fruit that lies just underneath.”
—DALE BAILEY, author of Night Wood and The End of the End of Everything, in The North Carolina Literary Review
What an absolutely fantastic debut collection Earthly Delights is. Jen Julian has a vivid imagination and the storytelling chops to match. Her characters face quandaries as well as conflict, all set in interesting and diverse locales. I loved watching these characters figure their way through their dilemma, sometimes making wise decisions, but sometimes being human, making mistakes. That’s okay, though, as mistakes are usually more interesting.
—MICHAEL CZYZNIEJEWSKI, author of I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories, in Story336
Other publications:
SHORT FICTION:
“The Woman We Called Vulture,” upcoming in hex
“Desire Paths: A Mapping,” upcoming in Third Coast Magazine
“Stars, Your Light Belongs to Us,” in Bourbon Penn
“Where Precious Things Are Kept,” Wigleaf
“Cat’s Cradle,” The Short Story, Cambridge Prize Shortlist
“I Have Entered My Garden, My Sweetheart, My Bride,” Wigleaf (Best Small Fictions Nominee)
“Seven Is a Lucky Number,” X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine (Best of the Net Nominee)
“Small Predators,” Milk Candy Review
“Stones Are Heaviest When Swallowed,”Okay Donkey
“Sister Johnson,” Jellyfish Review
“Hail, Beast,” JuxtaProse Literary Magazine
“Flyover,” SmokeLong Quarterly (Best Small Fictions Nominee)
“Attachment,” TriQuarterly, Issue 154
“One for Sorrow, Two for Joy,” Beecher’s Magazine, Issue 7
“For Small Creatures Such as We,” #WeAreNotThis:
Carolina Writers for Equality Charity Anthology
“The Little Ones Weary,” Greensboro Review, 99
“We Are Meant for Greater Things,” Cleaver Magazine
“Bone Men,” Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 5
“Castle Links Creek,” New South, Vol 8, Issue 2
“Glass Platform,” Antigonish Review, Vol 45, No. 179
“Restless Soul, Enjoy Your Youth,” Press 53’s 2013 Open Awards Anthology
“Stereograms,” New Delta Review
“Marginalia,” Toasted Cheese
“Hagridden,” Four Way Review
POETRY:
“You and Your Tulpa,” Liminality: A Magazine of Speculative Poetry
ESSAYS & OTHER CNF:
“How We Speak To Our Cats,” HOOT Review
“When This Spell Fails,” Grimoire Magazine
“Pearl of the East,” The Chattahoochee Review, Volume XXXV
“Uranium Field,” North Carolina Literary Review Online
“Mr. Drew’s Drill,” Press 53’s 2010 Open Awards Anthology
Jen Julian 