Whitney Collins’s fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, The Southeast Review, Grist, The Pinch, Moon City Review, Quarter After Eight, The Laurel Review, Lumina, and Raleigh Review, among others. She is the recipient of a 2020 Pushcart Prize, a semifinalist for American Short Fiction ’s 2019 The Short(er) Fiction Prize, and her flash horror is forthcoming in Catapult’s Tiny Nightmares anthology. Big Bad was the 2019 winner of Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Collins lives in Kentucky with her husband and two sons.

PRAISE FOR BIG BAD:

"[Collins] lays on the verve and wit across the 13 stories in this crisp collection....[and] exhibits a contagious appreciation for the world’s strange horrors, big and small."
—Publishers Weekly

"Beautifully written, wildly imaginative stories."
—Kirkus

"Kentucky author Whitney Collins begins her fantastic—and fantastical—story 'Lonelyhearts' like this: 'Lenora’s first heart arrived in a box of Rice Krispies. It fell into her cereal bowl with a damp thud, and for a brief moment she mistook it for a hunk of roast beef.' And the story only gets better. Collins’ story, full of literal hearts, is full of tenderness, loneliness, and love."
—Bradley Sides, Electric Literature, "7 Magical Realism Stories from the American South"

"Not a word is wasted in Big Bad, an unusual and masterful collection of short stories."
—Foreword Reviews, starred review

"Offbeat, high-concept worldbuilding."
—"Books for Short Attention Spans 2021," Publishers Weekly

"[A] deliciously dark world in which anything is possible and the most horrifying is probable."
—"Big Bad’ Pushes the Boundaries of Both Its Characters and Its Readers" by Kate Murphy, Southern Review of Books

"This is a collection that deals in the surety of the strange set in the everyday, in small worlds made close and particular. . . [y]et these stories are far from bleak, not only due to Collins’ humor, but to her granting of characters’ unexpected, and at first glance unfathomable, attempts at agency in the shuffle of life. There lies the beauty of these stories, for how does one, realistically, escape the shadow of grief, the loss of a child, the dissolution of a family, the realization that those we love are not who we thought they were? By reaching past realism to a place of imaginative relief, whether invented by the characters or inhabited by them, Collins illuminates the capacities and limits of our natures. . . . Collins, a Kentucky writer, is a storyteller we will be hearing much more from."
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, On the Seawall

"[T]his collection is truly diverse but not for the sake of it; these are deeply felt, thoroughly realized explorations. Missing limbs, unborn babies, absent fathers, the cycle of death and birth (not necessarily natural in either case); there’s repression, denial, the ache of loss, and of course LOVE (unrealized, unrequited, unwanted) pervades. And that’s just scratching the surface of the riches contained within. . . . I recommend Big Bad with joy and urgency."
—1455, online

“Sparkling.”
—Prevail, online

“Big Bad by Whitney Collins announces a voice as fresh as tomorrow morning. Darkly, subversively, hilarious stories carom along with brilliance and surety. In the title story of the collection, a woman gives birth to herself…over and over. In fiction both exquisitely bizarre and deeply satisfying, the excitement of discovery resounds throughout Collins’s work.” 
—Leslie Daniels, author of Cleaning Nabokov’s House  

“What a raw delight of a book! Big Bad is precise, relatable, and also psychedelic and feral, taking me on side roads I never dreamed of traveling, delivering profound and humane truths that leave me stunned. While each story is supremely original, the collection reads like an instant modern classic, to be found on the shelf between Joy Williams and George Saunders.” 
—Jardine Libaire, author of White Fur 

“To say that Whitney Collins has a unique voice is to make an understatement of massive proportions. Not only is she willing to go where other writers wouldn’t even consider going, she seems to revel in the opportunity to bring us along for the ride—and how thankful we are that she does. To read her collection of thirteen stories, Big Bad, is to spend time with one of our most exciting new talents, a writer speaking to so many of the challenges of modern life: how to have healthy relationships, how to love after loss, how to forgive ourselves for crimes real and imagined, and how to envision a world—or a life for oneself—that does not yet exist. Each story holds a universe within it: humor that will make you laugh out loud; characters who will make you cry; lines that demand to be memorized. This collection creates a fictional landscape as meaningful as any imagined space I’ve dared to enter—one so real, so unflinchingly honest, I didn’t realize I’d been transported, one so fascinating I didn’t want to leave.” 
—Rachel M. Harper, author of Brass Ankle Blues and This Side of Providence