The Art of Contraception

Susie Wild’s first collection is a quirky mix. Her short stories pivot on lust, loneliness and contraception – or the lack of it.  

Tales of the fantastic and the everyday spill over with glitter and shadows, sorrow and silliness. The cast of characters include a council worker who likes to take his holidays in the bathtub, an alcoholic lecturer who dreams of pixies, and a pregnant receptionist battling with her cravings whilst trying to solve the mystery of the office sandwich thief. Egg cups disappear. A woman has a bettle of wills with a wasp, and a musician's sister phones him daily to call him an idiot.

'Susie Wild's The Art of Contraception is a collection of eleven short stories and a novella, all linked by themes of sex, relationships and procreation. The watchword in this collection is variety, Wild approaching her subject from a diverse range of narrative voices, viewpoints and structures. Underpinning this literary ventriloquism, however, is the distinctive and unifying voice of Wild herself: amusingly quirky and darkly humorous, yet always ready to identify and sympathise with the loneliness and sense of loss that pervades the lives of her characters.[...]The Art of Contraception is well worth the read. If Parthian can continue to unearth writers of this calibre, then its new imprint will definitely be one to follow.' – Harri Roberts, Planet International

'Wild has a talent for writing about human oddness' – Carys Bray

Book of the Month, Buzz Magazine, October 2010: 'This is Susie Wild’s first collection of short stories. The title hints at a connection to contraception but some of the stories hold only loose connections, concentrating more on relationships and the obsessive behaviour of the often odd characters. Wild’s stories seem to have their core buried in the small things; those hidden behaviours we all try to keep secret – in the same way that Raymond Carver does. Veering from the purely observational into a strangely unnerving other-worldliness, these stories have at times a Lynchian (or even Twilight Zone) quality...'

Susie Wild is author of the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, the novella Arrivals and the poetry collection Better Houses. Her writing appears in publications like Poetry Digest, The Lonely Crowd, Wales Arts Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Lampeter Review, andRising. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Swansea University and an MA in Journalism from Goldsmiths. Awarded a place on Ty Newydd’s poetry masterclass, she has studied creative writing with Gillian Clarke and Imtiaz Dharker. She was writer in residence at the Mothership, Dorset, and her poems have been longlisted for the Mslexia Women's Poetry Award 2018, an Ink Sweat & Tears Pick of the Month, and a First Thursday performance winner.  She has performed her poems at events like the Glastonbury Festival, Hay Festival, Cardiff Book Festival, the Green Man Festival, the Laugharne Weekend and the Dylan Weekend. Her multimedia commission, ‘Sex Change Disco,’ in collaboration with artist Beth Greenhalgh, was performed at madeinroath and Cardiff Contemporary 2016. Born in London, she has moved from Cornwall and Devon to Swansea and Bristol. These days she lives in a Cardiff garret where she is writing her next book.