BOOKS BY ELLE NASH
DELIVER ME
reviews and praise
“Nash excels at capturing the claustrophobia of rural poverty and religious fundamentalism, homing in on seemingly small details, like a dirty sink, to illustrate the grinding conditions of Dee-Dee's life. Dee-Dee's desire to escape and inability to do so are harrowing, and the story unfolds like a thriller.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Nash lays her characters bare, and the hints of body horror and vivid descriptions of Dee-Dee’s despair tease at underlying pathological issues. Readers drawn to gritty character studies should take a look.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
interviews
gag reflex
reviews and praise
“Gag Reflex becomes an intimate portrait of a young woman who is struggling with her feelings of self-worth but also fighting really hard to manage her relationships with food and life.”
Gag Reflex on Dennis Coopers Favorite Books of 2022
“I urge people to read this book.”
“Nash’s ability is that she isn’t constrained to a subjective point of view at all, but may perhaps embody the omniscience of a daimon, trapped in a physical form insufficient to its capacities.”
“It’s more relevant than ever…Nash does not shy away from detailing the horrors of an eating disorder, though any such physical descriptions are eclipsed by the sharp articulations of its psychological impacts and the low self-esteem it engenders.”
“An alarming encounter with self-loathing.”
—Interview with J.C Holburn at The Masters Review
“I walked around in a haze for the next twenty-four hours, like you do when someone suddenly comes into your life and you know they are going to change it forever. I read a lot, but a book had never made me feel this way.”
—Interview with Barrie McIntyre at Write or Die Tribe
interviews
The Eve6 Guy gives Elle Nash advice about dealing with success envy over at Input Mag
nudes
reviews and praise
Nudes is featured in Dennis Cooper’s Favorite Fiction for 2021
Dubbed a Sad Girl Summer Book in Cosmo UK
Nudes is Scottish Book Trust’s Book of the Month for July
#2 On SPD’s Best-Seller List for June-July 2021
On Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2021
“Elle Nash has always been good at mapping the particulars of unspoken desire”
—Lit Hub
“Read her now before she’s the Queen of the Underground.”
“Relentlessly, whether the scene is a suburban home or an urban sex club, the aura of existential threat is borne.”
—Entropy Magazine
“Nash has modeled a portrayal of people operating on fringes of society.”
“Compulsively readable.” “The overall effect of Nash’s mastery of tension and efficiency is stories that compel you to read them, the way you might feel compelled to one more drink after you’ve had a few.”
“Transgressive and immediate: you feel these stories shoot through and wrap around you.”
“Never a dull moment, Nash succeeds in capturing the full attention of her reader with the finesse of the most popular girl in school sharing everyone’s secrets.”
“Nash’s stories often hinge on a moment of crystalline reflection".”
“Nash’s style carries the general malaise and disconnection of Marie Calloway’s work, but it’s darker, more sadistic. There’s a stylistic nod to early Mumblecore films (think Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha or Mutual Appreciation) in the suburban homes and run-down apartments populating the book. It feels strange listing literary antecedents because while the work obviously owes a debt to 2010s Tumblr and the Alt-lit of yesteryear, Nash’s style is entirely her own.”
interviews
Agency Over Everything: with Danielle Chelosky at The Rumpus
Real Life is Dangerous All The Time: With Gauraa Shekhar at Maudlin House
Some Sort of Obscene Concept: Interview with Michael Seidlinger at Publisher’s Weekly
Released from Suffering: Interview by Shy Watson at BOMB Magazine
Snapshots of Grit: Elle Nash Interviewed at the Millions by J.C. Hallman
animals eat each other
REVIEWS AND PRAISE
Dubbed a 2018 Debut Writer To Watch by Publishers Weekly
“If there’s anything to be said about Elle Nash’s Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc, Apr.), it’s that it does not shy away from darkness.”
–Daniel Lefferts, Publishers Weekly
“Nash writes with psychological precision, capturing Lilith’s volatile shifts between directionless frustration, self-destructiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerable need. A complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review
“A scintillating work of literary erotica...the way [Lilith] elucidates and wrestles with her sexuality and identity is perceptive and raw.”
—Book Riot
“The first page of Animals Eat Each Other knocked me on my ass...Elle writes with an incredible amount of intensity and emotional honesty and, damn it, just read this book.”
—Lit Reactor
“Electric, sensual, and brutally human, Nash explores the boundaries (or lack thereof) when it comes to sexual desire. It is an exquisitely crafted work where every sentence feels so important, so real that it stings the skin. ... A supremely gripping work....a remarkable novel that crackles from beginning to end.”
—Medium
“Raw, moving, and utterly original.”
—Popsugar
“An unsettling work in the tradition of books delving into the emotionally ragged connections that form in the least likely places.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Nash is an acute observer of human appetites, and Animals Eat Each Other establishes her as a voice on the rise.”
—The Masters Review
“A mélange of sex and violence and drug use and teenage ennui . . . a devastating first book.”
—The Fanzine
“A hair-raising tale of sex and drugs and self-harm and self-hatred well outside the safe boundaries of New York Lit”
—3 AM
“Elle Nash's Animals East Each Other is a desire map, a cartography of eros. Two women and a man weave their contradictions and obsessions and aches into one another until names, bodies, and selves dissolve and reconstitute in ways they could not have imagined. Mirrorings, doublings, triplings, and reproductions bring the right questions to the surface: who are we when we enter into love stories? Does anyone know? A heartbomb.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
“A savage, nuanced dive into the dynamics of queer sexuality, love and anti-love, jealousy, sadomasochism, Satanism, and everything else caught in the fray of a woman’s self-abandonment. Nash’s subtly spare prose renders matter-of-fact what we’re so often afraid to articulate to ourselves, let alone to the people we give ourselves over to.”
—Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State
“Animals Eat Each Other reminds me of the ’80s, with its Satanism and ménage à trois teen lifestyle and atheism in the face of mass Christianity. Elle Nash has written a novel you can’t put down, even if the Satanic Bible or a deck of Tarot cards is within your reach.”
—Elizabeth Ellen, author of Person/a
“If Holden Caulfield was the face of adolescence during Salinger’s era, then Nash’s Lilith represents the face of today’s youth as they struggle to come-of-age in a world where people are increasingly more and more alienated… Nash does not flinch when she captures the realities she has chosen as her subject: This is a portrait of addiction. This is the story of a girl caught in a particular purgatory between high school and adulthood…we have to look, even if and when some of us will undoubtedly see ourselves looking back.”
—Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, author of Fig
“Strands of emotional confusion and self-loathing run through Animals Eat Each Other, and Nash writes brilliantly and viscerally about the connections between physical and emotional intimacy. There is a superbly tactile flow to her beautiful, stripped-down prose that absolutely sucks the reader in, making this a disturbing and deeply moving piece of modern storytelling. Brilliant stuff.”
—Doug Johnstone, The Big Issue
INTERVIEWS
OTHERPPL with Brad Listi
With Kristen Felicetti, The Bushwick Review
Boundless Lit on the Chemistry of Human Relationships
On Radio Gorgeous with Donna Freeman
With Jo Good, on BBC Radio London
I CAN REMEMBER THE MEANING OF EVERY TAROT CARD BUT I CAN’T REMEMBER WHAT I TEXTED YOU LAST NIGHT
reviews and Praise
"The poems in this chapbook are those of a witch, a warrior, a wolf, a goddess with claws. Elle Nash is able to balance the hilarious and tragic, the heartbreaking and the furious. She will slay you, and you will love her for it."
—Juliet Escoria, Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press)
"Elle Nash’s 'I Can Remember the Meaning of Every Tarot Card But I Can't Remember What I Texted You Last Night' is a winner of Nostrovia! Press’ 2016 N.Y.C. Chapbook Series for reasons written not in stars but in sweat on tangled bedsheets, in the crushed spaces of apartments and the expanse of memory, nostalgia, bitterness, and grief. Refracted to us through the lens of the tarot, the poems here are both mythology and autobiography, legend and confession—it is impossible to read them without wondering precisely whose hot entrails are spread out during this divination, and whether the truths being whispered in the dark are the author’s, the world’s, or one’s own."
—Sonya Vatomksy, Salt is For Curing (Sator Press)
"this moon doesn’t remember the first night she met me & i understand. there were so many other things going on, but for some reason i couldn’t forget it. the lake was there, laughing as always. her ripples wouldn’t stop shaking her surface & all the moon could do was reflect. it was spring & there were still christmas lights hanging from houses hidden in the trees.
this moon peels off a few rocks from her skin & we skip them until the lake breaks down crying. we run.
after catching her breath, this moon says, i don’t remember the last time i missed you."
“Identities are everything. A person can find many identities which suit them ideally. No one is limited. Possibilities are endless. The animalistic instincts of a person never subside they are there to all degrees. Consumption happens in a consumerist society: of art of leisure of love.”
Beach Sloth