Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Kevin Wilson
Kevin Wilson writes about families that have come apart in some strange, specific way — children who spontaneously combust when agitated, parents who stage elaborate performance-art pranks using their own kids as props — and takes the strangeness completely seriously as a way into real grief, real love, and real family dysfunction. The premises are absurd. The emotional accounting underneath them never is.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated August 2026 · ~6 min read
Quick answer
Kevin Wilson has written seven books: two story collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (2009) and Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine (2018), and five novels — The Family Fang (2011), Perfect Little World (2017), Nothing to See Here (2019), Now Is Not the Time to Panic (2022), and Run for the Hills (2025). Start with Nothing to See Here, his best-known novel and a Read with Jenna book club pick.
Key facts
- Role: Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing, University of the South (Sewanee)
- Books written: 7, published 2009–2025 — 2 story collections, 5 novels
- Awards: Shirley Jackson Award (Tunneling to the Center of the Earth); Now Is Not the Time to Panic named a best book of the year by Time
- Best-known book: Nothing to See Here (2019), a New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna pick
- Adaptations: The Family Fang was adapted into a 2015 film starring Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman
Why trust this list: Every book below is one I’ve read in full. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
Wilson’s debut collection introduces the register he’d work in for the next fifteen years: surreal, often absurd premises — a boy who can eat glass, a family living inside a decommissioned nuclear missile silo — handled with straightforward emotional sincerity rather than played for pure whimsy. It won the Shirley Jackson Award and an ALA Alex Award.
The clearest early evidence of the method his later novels expand: strangeness as access route to feeling, not a substitute for it.
The Family Fang
Caleb and Camille Fang are performance artists who spent their children’s entire childhood staging elaborate, often humiliating public “art” using Annie and Buster as unwitting props. Now adults and both in crisis, the siblings return home, where their parents propose one final, ambiguous performance. Wilson’s first novel, adapted into a 2015 film starring Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman.
The defining exploration of his central question: what does it cost a child to be raised as material for someone else’s art, even — especially — when that someone is a parent who insists it’s love?
Perfect Little World
A pregnant teenager joins an experimental communal parenting project — ten families raising ten children collectively, with no child knowing which adults are their biological parents — funded by a psychologist convinced this will produce healthier kids than the nuclear family. Wilson uses the premise to ask what family actually requires versus what convention has simply trained us to assume it requires.
His most direct interrogation of what “family” is actually made of, stripped of biology and convention and rebuilt as a deliberate, chosen structure.
Nothing to See Here
Lillian is hired by her wealthy former roommate, now married to a rising senator, to look after her step-twins — children who spontaneously burst into flames when they become agitated, without being harmed by it themselves. What starts as a bizarre premise becomes a genuinely moving story about an unglamorous, unbiological kind of caretaking and love.
His best-known and most purely charming book, a New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna pick. The absurd premise is the hook; the tenderness underneath it is why people reread it.
Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine
Wilson’s second story collection returns to family as the central subject — parents and children failing and loving each other in equal measure, told across a range of registers from realist to lightly surreal, with less consistent strangeness than his debut collection.
A useful bridge between his early surrealism and his more grounded later novels — the strangeness dials down here in favor of straightforward emotional precision.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic
Frankie and Zeke, two teenage misfits in Coalfield, Tennessee, spend a summer making and secretly plastering the town with a strange, evocative poster — a small act of shared art that spirals into a local panic. Decades later, an adult Frances, now a famous author, gets a call from a journalist who’s traced the poster back to her. Named a best book of the year by Time.
His clearest statement about art made in private, between two people, and what it costs — or doesn’t — to have that private thing exposed to the world later on.
Run for the Hills
Madeline Hill has spent her whole life on her family’s Tennessee farm with just her mother, when a stranger named Reuben pulls up one day and tells her he believes he’s her half-brother, both abandoned by the same father. Wilson’s most recent novel, continuing his pattern of building fiction around unconventional family structures discovered rather than chosen.
His newest exploration of found and fractured family — siblings who have to build a relationship from scratch as adults rather than inheriting one from childhood.
Frequently asked questions
From the bookshelf
Find your next book — hand-picked, not algorithmically sorted.
If strange premises handled with real emotional sincerity are your thing, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author pages, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
