Domesticated Wild Things

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for 2012 goes to Xhenet Aliu for her manuscript, Domesticated Wild Things. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.

“There is a sophisticated brand of humor in Alieu’s fiction—her stories in Domesticated Wild Things will make you laugh out loud but will not burden you with any sense of guilt that might come from laughing at people,” says Kwame Dawes, editor of Prairie Schooner. “Her affection for her beautifully rendered characters is contagious, making the humor affirming and humanizing. These are entertaining and insightful stories full of surprises and revelations. We are thrilled to publish what will be her debut collection.”

Xhenet Aliu hails from Waterbury, Connecticut. Her fiction has appeared in journals such as Glimmer Train, Hobart, and The Barcelona Review, and she has received multiple scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a grant from The Elizabeth George Foundation. A former secretary, waitress, entertainment journalist, and private investigator, she received her B.A. from Southern Connecticut State University and an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Currently, she lives in Athens, Georgia, after recent stints in Brooklyn, Montana, and Utah. She is of Albanian Muslim and Lithuanian Catholic descent.

“I remember when I was about 20 years old, before I’d ever submitted a story or even heard the term ‘literary magazine,’ picking up a copy of Prairie Schooner at my local Barnes & Noble and feeling awed that a forum of amazing contemporary writing like this existed,” says Aliu. “I’m even more awed now that my own collection will get to wear Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press on its cover. I couldn’t imagine a better outfit for my book.”

About the Book

Just down the highway from Connecticut’s Gold Coast is the state’s rusty underbelly, the wretched, used-up sort of place where you might find Xhenet Aliu’s Domesticated Wild Things: the reluctant mothers, delinquent dads, and not-quite-feral children, yet dreamers all. These are the children of immigrants who found boarded-up brass mills instead of the gilded streets of America; they’re the teenaged girls raised in the fluorescent glow of Greek diners, the middle-aged men with pump trucks and teratomas. These are people who have fled, or who should have. And if they are indeed familiar, it is because Aliu writes what is real, whether we ourselves, her readers, have seen it up close or not. And her stories make sense in a way that matters.

A young mother buys into a real-estate investment seminar offered on an infomercial, only to be put back into her place by a bully in foreclosure. A closeted wrestler befriends a latchkey seven-year-old neighbor who harbors secrets of her own. A YMCA counselor tries to reclaim shoes stolen by a troubled young camper.

What they share is a biting humor, an eye for the absurd, and fumbling attempts at human connection, all rendered irresistible—and as moving as they are amusing—by a writer whose work is at once edgy and endearing and prize winning for reasons any reader can appreciate.

Praise

“Offering sharp dialogue and a sense of the absurd, the book’s 11 stories evoke compassion rather than pity for this cast of wretched souls. Humorous and vibrant.”—Publishers Weekly

“Aliu’s colorful characters, both resilient yet troubled, bolster the 11 spirited tales.”—Leah Strauss, Booklist Online

“Filled with both humor and compassion these original stories reflect the bog which sucks the hard up and those living on the edge deeper into the quicksand of life. . . . The stories will appeal to the adolescents and the bewildered young who will recognize their own ruminations so aptly expressed by the emotionally tortured characters.”—Aron Row, San Francisco Book Review

“This may not be the Connecticut you thought you knew, but I, for one, am grateful to see those velvet curtains drawn aside.”—Jennifer Kelly, Center For Literary Publishing

“Xhenet Aliu’s stories evoke with fierceness and a resilient compassion what it means to be disadvantaged and self-destructive, her characters negotiating the kind of homes in which your bed and your mother might be missing, or in which your husband might be raising venomous snakes in your bedroom closet. Her protagonists live at that intersection of the ethnically despised and the economically demolished, but they’re not ready to quit, and they never stop believing that everyone, everywhere, is entitled to a little something special.”—Jim Shepard, author of You Think That’s Bad

“There is a lot of the body in these stories: stink and rot and perfume and dead skin. Often out of control and goofy, Domesticated Wild Things is also extremely funny and mordant. The wild energy of Aliu’s diction mocks and illuminates the English language.”—Sherman Alexie, author of Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories