Nudes is a 2021 short story collection written by British-American author Elle Nash that reflects on the lives of working-class women. It includes 24 stories split into sections named "Fluffers," "Yuri," "Pukkaki," "Moneyshot," "POV," and "Snuff." It discusses transactional relationships, sexuality, eating disorders, obsession, and death. The stories are largely set in the 1990s and 2000s, and could form part of a shared world. In the title story "Nudes", a woman has an imagined affair with her neighbor while her wife struggles with alcoholism.
The collection of stories began in 2013, the first stories written being "Rifle," "Off Screen I Ache," and "Deathwish 006" and the last being "Nudes." Nash also states that her earliest publicized story included in this collection was "Joan Jumps into the Sea," written in 2014, published in 2015 in The Offing. For the short story "Survivalist," Nash states that she collaborated with author Elizabeth Ellen for the editing process. Ellen is also mentioned as a best friend and mentor in the acknowledgements of the collection.
Nash states that although the short story collection doesn't have a traditional structure, she was inspired by Dennis Cooper's collection Frisk and its interwoven stories. The story "Satanism" was inspired by The Artist is Present performed by Marina AbramoviÃÂ.
The magazine Cosmopolitan featured Nudes as one of the 18 books for 2022 "sad girl summer." Transgressive fiction author Dennis Cooper, best known for his series The George Miles Cycle, listed the short story collection as his favorite 2021 media on his blog. It was listed in Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021. Maudlin House, a magazine on experimental literature, a review writes "The concrete and existential exist side by side in these stories. Sometimes, the directness of a line hits me like a brick and I need to lie down."
Artist Kerry St. Laurent created a series of eight art pieces in a collection named "Nudes X Elle Nash(2021)" in response to the short story collection.