Sex Romp Gone Wrong
Stories by Julia Ridley Smith
Available 2/6/2024
In her debut story collection, Julia Ridley Smith navigates the currents and eddies of desire, sex, love, and relationships.
These twelve highly accomplished stories are witty and accessible, intelligent and thought-provoking. A girls' week at the beach prompts hot tub drinking, awkward confessions, and a poignant reconsideration of friendship. A caregiver extracts a small repayment from her elderly patient for his long-forgotten role in the demise of her family. A young woman, new to New York City, finds herself in a complex but tacky love affair and reckons with the unfolding plot of her life. In the title story, a woman plots to conceive a second child while at a convention hotel with her husband and teenage daughter, both of whom have other plans. Smith’s stories will beguile and delight readers while at the same time exploring the deep and often difficult ties of family, marriage, and romantic love in modern life.
“Sex Romp Gone Wrong is a dazzlingly inventive collection, and Julia Ridley Smith writes so beautifully about the intensity of being alive, of wanting more than you can have, of navigating the absurdity of the world with various degrees of success. You'd be hard pressed to find a writer who is so genuinely funny and yet knows the exact moment to turn that humor towards a moment of realization so deeply felt that you have to read the line again. I can't think of a better compliment for Smith's stories than the simple fact that you will want to read them over and over.”
—Kevin Wilson, Now Is Not the Time to Panic and Nothing to See Here
“Funny, mournful, and alluring, with shining moments of experimentation […] At home on the uneasy ground between humor and solemnity, the expansive story collection Sex Romp Gone Wrong devotes concerted care and attention to the hidden lives of women and children.”
—Foreword Reviews
Sex Romp Gone Wrong is Julia Ridley Smith’s first story collection. Her first book, The Sum of Trifles, is a memoir published by the University of Georgia Press (2021) as a title in their Crux literary nonfiction series. Julia’s short stories and essays have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Arts and Letters, the Carolina Quarterly, Chelsea, Ecotone, Electric Literature, the Greensboro Review, the New England Review, Southern Cultures, and The Southern Review, among other places. Julia teaches creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill.
