Praise for Entry Level
Wimmer is a strong writer and fills the pages with elegant, evocative phrasing (“We said words of respect in our native languages, which between the eight of us totaled fourteen gods and six words meaning ‘grace’ ”). Her tone is often wry (“Evelyn thought of her bed like a trapdoor spider, capturing the interest and monetary resources of her romantic partners”), and even the book’s most sardonic narrators balance their misanthropy with a touch of curiosity.
If punchy first sentences are to your taste, Wendy Wimmer’s “Entry Level” (Autumn House Fiction Prize) is the book for you. “When Mary Ellen’s left breast grew back on its own during our Saturday dinner break, we had confirmation that something weird was happening.” Many intros seem designed to startle; several stories enter fantastical terrain. In the delightful “Texts from Beyond,” a company purportedly helps people send messages to deceased relatives. Equally affecting are stories more rooted in the real, where Wimmer gets closer to character and emotion, such as “Billet-Doux,” told via unsent letters addressed to celebrities, random people, inanimate objects, a recurring guy on the BART and the protagonist herself.
In the world of Entry Level, no job is too small, nor is it ever just a job. In cities and across rural landscapes and dreamscapes, we find clerks and corpses, mothers and daughters, cruise entertainers and scientists, grappling with longing and loss. The stories are, at turns, heartfelt and hilarious, wry and whimsical, full of magic and mayhem. These are well-crafted love stories, ghost stories, and stories of everyday people just trying to navigate life’s cruelties and impossibilities. Wimmer writes with an intimacy and immediacy that take you down a fresh rabbit hole from the first line, each time. Each tale is as smart, exquisite, and surprising as the next. I really didn’t want this collection to end!
— Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
This gleefully subversive debut presents 15 weird, wild, and wonderful stories of everyday folks surviving in a world gone haywire.
—People Magazine
Wendy Wimmer’s new collection, Entry Level, embraces all these sticky, visceral questions with tenderness, heart, and a good deal of humor. It’s work that refuses to take the body out of things.
—Kristen Arnett, Electric Literature
Wimmer’s innovative and darkly humorous debut collection employs emergency situations and fantastical elements as the protagonists struggle to make a living with low-paying jobs.
Many of the stories tilt toward the weird. We see dream babies, ghost babies, conjoined twins fighting over a boyfriend. Several tales feature a hint of the supernatural, “some kind of insane magical event” that propels the action, often in the vein of George Saunders’s fiction. In “Strange Magic,” it’s the roller rink fountain of youth; in others, it’s a grantor of wishes, a reanimated bog mummy, or a chorus of oracular somniloquy. Some tales here are quite short, only a few pages, but Wimmer is at her strongest when she gives her figures space to develop. Once the crux of the plot is established, the play of the writing becomes more entertaining; we get a greater sense of these characters’ desires—sometimes fulfilled but often thwarted. In the end, the stories in Entry Level are fundamentally fun to read, and the book is a promising debut for a gifted writer.
Wimmer works magic with language and character, posing thought-provoking what-ifs: what if we could get a do-over by going back in time? What if there was a magic pill that took control of the consequences of our choices? My favorite explores the origination of dreams in “Where She Went.”
Both hilarious and heartfelt, Entry Level explores the real and surreal in prose that is surprising, vivid, and unafraid to engage with big topics such as class, gender, and race with delicacy and emotional precision. The story “Ghosting” from this collection was Recommended Reading’s most read story of the year!
—Electric Lit
The stories in Entry Level are grounded in the familiar—a cruise ship, a bingo parlor, a skating rink, an ordinary home—then veer into the uncanny, into dreams and sometimes nightmares. Wendy Wimmer writes with great skill and quirky humor, so that we are led, step by step, into other realities almost without our noticing. The dead don’t stay dead, or at least, they don’t stay quiet. Time spins and reverses. These are unsettling and always entertaining stories.
—Jean Thompson, author of The Poet’s House
The stories in Entry Level are propulsive, funny, delightfully unpredictable, and utterly addictive. Wendy Wimmer is a true original—a bright star of her generation. Here’s hoping Entry Level is the beginning of a long, fruitful career!
—Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk
Press for ENTRY LEVEL: STORIES
Wisconsin Public Radio Beta with Doug Gordon, Dec 10, 2022.
Electric Lit: Recommended Reading’s 10 Most Popular Issues of 2022.
Society of Midland Authors Awards, honoree, Best Adult Fiction
The Millions Notable New Releases
The Millions Most Anticipated The Great Second Half of 2022
Shelf Media Group’s Connections: Interview with Alyse Mgrdichian, March 2023
People Magazine, October 2022 Best New Book
Entry Level: Stories on Goodreads
About Entry Level: Stories by Wendy Wimmer
Wendy Wimmer’s debut short story collection, Entry Level, contains a range of characters who are trying to find, assert, or salvage their identities. These fifteen stories center around the experience of being underemployed—whether by circumstance, class, gender, race, or other prevailing factors—and the toll this takes on an individual. Wimmer pushes the boundaries of reality, creating stories that are funny, fantastic, and at times terrifying. Her characters undergo feats of endurance, heartbreak, and loneliness, all while trying to succeed in a world that so often undervalues them. From a young marine biologist suffering from imposter syndrome and a haunting to a bingo caller facing another brutal snowstorm and a creature that may or not be an angel, Wimmer’s characters are all confronting an oppressive universe that seemingly operates against them or is, at best, indifferent to them. These stories reflect on the difficulties of modern-day survival and remind us that piecing together a life demands both hope and resilience.
Entry Level was selected by Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Fiction Prize.
About Wendy Wimmer
My work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Per Contra, Paper Darts, The Believer, Waxwing, Jet Fuel Review, Blackbird, and others. I was fiction editor at Witness Magazine and co-founded the UntitledTown Book and Author Festival. I hold a Masters and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, respectively. I’m an editor for a large technology media company. I work from my home in Wisconsin, where I am supervised by two dogs and a cat, all of whom enjoy napping on the job.
I love to hear from readers and join book clubs, both in person and over virtual events. Please reach out and talk to me. I’m also on Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram and host frequent writing craft events.