Elwin Cotman is a storyteller from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of three collections of speculative short stories, The Jack Daniels Sessions EP, Hard Times Blues, and Dance on Saturday which was a Philip K. Dick Award finalist and selected as an NPR Best Book of the Year. His next books (from Scribner) are Weird Black Girls (2024) and his debut novel The Age of Ignorance (2025). Cotman's work has appeared in Grist, Electric Lit, Buzzfeed, The Southwestern Review, and The Offing, among others. He holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and a MFA from Mills College.

Dance on Saturday by Elwin Cotman

Planted deeply in the dark, musical fantastic heart of American storytelling, Cotman's half dozen tales are ripe for the picking. In the title novella, Cotman imagines a group of near-immortals living in Pittsburgh in an uneasy truce with Lord Decay. Their truce is threatened when one of them takes pity on a young woman who knows their secret. In "Among the Zoologists," a game writer on their way to a convention falls in with a group of rogue Darwinists whose baggage contains a great mystery. A volleyball tournament devolves into nightmare and chaos in "Mine." In Cotman's hands, the conventions of genres from fairytales to Victorian literature to epic fantasy and horror give shape to marvelously new stories.

CURATOR'S NOTE

I'm delighted for this chance to further showcase Elwin Cotman's Dance on Saturday, a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, in which myths and folktales combine with gritty modern life, refreshing familiar fantasy concepts with elements of Black and African American heritage and culture, producing narratives that feel completely new. Lauded as a "sensuous, polyphonic feast" by the New York Times, driven by virtuoso prose, Cotman's stories dazzle. – Mike Allen

 

REVIEWS

  • "Karen Russell's cover blurb praises Cotman as 'a synthesizer … of lewd dialect and high lyricism.' I'll speak instead of Cotman's high dialect and lewd lyricism, of how his fashioning of character voices is superbly disciplined, lit from within, while his lyricism is the realm of bawdy jokes and opacity, a kind of literary trolling."

    – Amal El-Mohtar, New York Times Book Review

  • "The landscapes of Elwin Cotman are mythical, searching, and stimulated by haunting fanaticism. Among his third and most ambitious story collection are tales of magical scope—they do more than simply spellbind; they seduce, invite, crack open the extraordinary. . . . In the mold of Octavia Butler and Karen Russell, Dance on Saturday is a bold leap of speculative fiction."

    – Jason Parham, Wired

  • "Cotman wields a compelling literary voice packing both a wallop and a deft touch."

    – Fred Shaw, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Seven Watsons (excerpt)

Elwin Cotman

If I had the time, I'd tell all kinds of stories bout Pittsburgh Job Corps. But I only got time for one, so it's got to be the Watsons. The rest I'll get to later.

One night in September, I was chilling in the dorm with the buls. Loominati was skinny, Lindsey was pudgy, I was and will be fat. Three hundred pounds since I was little. The buls used to say I looked like a black version of a sitcom dad, especially on nights like that when I was in jeans shorts, a tank, and them reindeer slippers I got for Christmas. Loom lay in his top bunk, shirtless in scrub pants, knitting needles flashing as he worked on a black-and-red blanket. Years in Job Corps and ain't a single RA knew he kept them needles, else they'd take them as contraband. Me and Lindsey lounged in bean bag chairs playing Madden on an old tube TV. We had to pause when the RA came in, big orange-haired whitebul called Ortilani, who says we got a new intake. Loom vanished them needles under his pillow.

"I did the last intake," Lindsey told Ortilani.

Real rap, I kept my head down when RAs came calling. Loom said he'd do it. The bul slipped on his flip-flops, scrub top, and red hoodie and shuffled to work. Meantime, I was losing 22 to 7.