Nights from This Galaxy

Finalist for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction

Electric Literature, "The Must-Read Short Story Collections of 2023"

"Spare, haunting. . . grimly beautiful."
—Kirkus Reviews

"[L]yrical and hypnotic. . . . This one ought to make a splash."
—Publishers Weekly

"Nights From This Galaxy by Wil Weitzel is a merciless debut on the troubled relationships between humans and nature, humans and animals, and humans and humans. Travelers keep watch over a dying lion in the Kalahari Desert. A boy is abused by his stepfather, restrained on a leash and forced to sleep outside in rural Tennessee. A woman sacrifices herself to the wolves of the Adirondacks. Guilt and shame echo through these pages, often consuming the characters with a viscous bite."

—Electric Literature, "The Must-Read Short Story Collections of 2023"

“These tales by Wil Weitzel have the still, piney quietude you find in a forest when a gust of air brings a scent rustling through. Then just like that they're over, and something special lingers. What magic, what beauty there is in these pages.”
—John Freeman, author of Wind, Trees

“Ranging over nearly the whole globe, this taut gathering of gorgeously written stories, dense with apex predators—sharks, snakes, lions, lynxes, wolves, and, most of all, people—makes a stately but impassioned case for the illimitable value of the natural world and our life-giving relationship to it. Weitzel combines a naturalist’s knowledge and a tremendous observational facility to tell the tales of people who see themselves as part of fearsome nature, not set apart from it; who battle and defend animals with the same complex, fierce, and intertwined devotion with which they battle and defend the people in their lives. Weitzel’s voice is arrestingly original; his taciturn but moving dialogue has an oracular cadence, and he tunes in to a frequency that seems to reach up from the deepest depths of consciousness itself. Weitzel captures a way of life—unflinching discipline and dignity, an innate sense of the honor of work, and something close to genuine humility—that is fighting ferociously to hang on, and that we desperately need for our spiritual survival. Weitzel is part stylist and part shaman, but his work is all art, and art of the highest order.”
—Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

 “To read these stories is to feel the primal pull of wilderness, the absolute bewilderment of grief, the knife's edge that comes when we must choose this life or this other life altogether. I found myself leaning forward reading these stories—arrested, hyperaware, and, ultimately, awed. This is a first book to reckon with.”

—Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and The Mountain and the Fathers

"Wil Weitzel has left me no choice but to burden him with comparisons to Chekov, Hemingway, and Munro. His stories are that kind of brilliant. Set in myriad vividly drawn geographic and socio-economic landscapes, his vast array of fully realized characters runs the gamut: young and old; innocent and evil; cross-species; predators and prey; brutal and tender; achingly sympathetic and unforgivably loathsome. The deliberate, intentional cruelties people inflict on one another (and on animal life) juxtaposed with inherent decency and kindness join forces to expose the mind, heart, and blood of humanity and the inhumanity of humankind. The prose is exquisite, but these stories are anything but pretty. Rather, they are the stuff of great literature: unflinching and beautiful.

—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits For Food