‘The Wallcreeper’ Is Nell Zink’s Debut Novel. Photo Books of The Times By PARUL SEHGAL You don’t read Nell Zink so much as step into the ring with her. Every sentence is a jab or feint, rigged for surprise. Every word feels like a verb. The plot leaps will give you vertigo. Her debut novel, “The Wallcreeper,” is a very funny, very strange work of unhinged brilliance — rude sex comedy meets environmental tract. “The Wallcreeper” has the lineaments of a familiar story — young Americans go abroad and come apart — but it also has Tiffany, who sounds like no one else in American fiction. The rest of the opening scene unfurls like something out of “Fawlty Towers.” It’s an antic episode, a fine introduction to the universe of this book, its off-kilter charm. She is especially crafty when it comes to sex. Ms. For all the sweetness of these scenes, Ms.
Of course, Ms. So we see her mind begin to roam, to move like a writer’s mind. Ms. (Mr. By Nell Zink 193 pages. Photo Books of The Times By PARUL SEHGAL Ms. Of course, Ms. Ms. (Mr. By Nell Zink. 'Spillover,' by David Quammen - SFGate. Gallery_thumbnails_show|article-gallery-4004705|article-gallery-4004705|0 gallery_overlay_open|article-gallery-4004705|article-gallery-4004705|0 gallery_overlay_open_thumbs|article-gallery-4004705|article-gallery-4004705|0 Spillover, by David Quammen Photo: W. W. Norton & Co David Quammen Photo: Lynn Donaldson 'Spillover,' by David Quammen Back to Gallery gallery_thumbs_close|article-gallery-4004705|article-gallery-4004705|0 gallery_overlay_close|article-gallery-4004705|article-gallery-4004705|0 Spillover Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic By David Quammen (Norton; 587 pages; $28.95) In 2008, a Dutch woman on a guided trek through Uganda climbed gamely down into a remote, sunken cave - a cave better known for the few indolent pythons underfoot than for the tens of thousands of bats that teemed overhead.
It was 13 days later, back home in the Netherlands, when the woman felt the first flush of illness; soon, her fever climbed, her organs failed, she went into a coma. ‘Spillover,’ by David Quammen. What a confounding summer it was. At agricultural fairs across the country, people gathered for the simple pleasure of devouring deep-fried Mars bars were coming down with a once-placid pig virus, a variant of H3N2 influenza. Over 300 cases have been confirmed so far, with at least one death. In Texas and elsewhere, pharmacy shelves are shorn of mosquito repellent thanks to the most serious outbreak of a mosquito-borne bird virus — West Nile — the country has ever seen.
In Massachusetts, high school football games are being canceled for fear of yet another animal microbe, Eastern equine encephalitis virus, currently stalking the state’s residents. That is to say, David Quammen’s meaty, sprawling new book, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” arrives not a moment too soon. Photo Much of the book details Quammen’s prodigious, globe-trotting adventures with microbe hunters in the field, trapping bats in southern China and hysterical monkeys in Bangladesh.
C’mon. David Quammen’s ‘Spillover’ Owes Much to Faulkner. Photo “Don’t have the monkey,” David Quammen said before lunch the other day at Casa Mono, a Catalan restaurant on Irving Place in Manhattan. “Or if you do, order it medium-well.” There was a haunch of some strange salted and air-cured mammal on the bar, but despite the restaurant’s name (Casa Mono means Monkey House in Spanish), there is no monkey on the menu, and a good thing too. As Mr. Quammen points out in his scary but hard-to-put-down new book, “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” eating tainted chimpanzee meat is a good way to come down with the Ebola virus. Ebola is just one of many horrific diseases that turn up in “Spillover.”
“We’re shaking loose viruses and dislodging them from their natural ecological limitations, places where they aren’t very abundant and have competition, even within a single animal,” Mr. Mr. “I’m not one of those heroic types,” said Edward C. Charles H. Mr. But his greatest influence as a science writer, Mr. He smiled. Photo Mr. Mr. Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper – Dorothy. “Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn’t. I don’t know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth that is as funny and as grown-up as anything I’ve read in years.
And there are some jokes in here that a young Don DeLillo would kill to have written. Excerpts from The Wallcreeper are available in n+1 and at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading (where you can also learn how the book came to Dorothy). “Nell Zink’s heady and rambunctious debut novel . . . moves at breakneck speed . . . “[A]n instrument of delight, an offering of kinship. “A strange, funny, super-engaging book.” bustle.