The Wilds is Julia Elliott’s first collection. Ami Tian says that in Elliott’s debut short story collection, “speculative fiction meets Southern gothic to create stories that highlight the fantastic strangeness of contemporary life.” Publishers Weekly writes: “The debut collection from Pushcart Prize–winning Elliott is a brilliant combination of emotion and grime, wit and horror.” The Caribbean appears in more than one of the stories, one of which is set on a nameless Caribbean island, Mukti (“Regeneration at Mukti”).

Book Description: At an obscure South Carolina nursing home, a lost world reemerges as a disabled elderly woman undergoes newfangled brain-restoration procedures and begins to explore her environment with the assistance of strap-on robot legs. At a deluxe medical spa on a nameless Caribbean island, a middle-aged woman hopes to revitalize her fading youth with grotesque rejuvenating therapies that combine cutting-edge medical technologies with holistic approaches and the pseudo-religious dogma of Zen-infused…