The arresting and brilliantly original collection of short stories from the prize-winning and bestselling author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.
"An absolute pleasure" New York Times
From a man's illicit tryst cut short by his estranged son's homecoming, a prostitute dominatrix about to be caught with a dead US congressman, to a performance artist whose grotesque weight-gain becomes an art-world phenomenon, Hale's deliberate prose, dark humour, and unforgettable characters explore the secrets beneath the surface of contemporary American lives.
In The Fat Artist and Other Stories, Hale openly embraces the grotesque side of human nature and the unnerving intersection between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation.
MORE PRAISE FOR THE FAT ARTIST AND OTHER STORIES
"Benjamin Hale writes from an altitude that is entirely his own. ... The Fat Artist is a brilliant, ceaselessly engaging book." Joseph O'Neill
"Hale's well-hewn, often violent tales are saturated with sadness and full of strange, marginal folk, but the thoughts, desires, and failures of these oddball characters are acutely recognizable . . . This book is at once absurd, morbid, melancholy, ridiculous, and disturbing." Publisher's Weekly
"[An] excellent new story collection . . . like the flare of a satellite that will one day decay and crash back down to Earth, it's oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from." Los Angeles Times
Author Biography
Benjamin Hale is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, a winner of a Michener-Copernicus Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and shortlistee for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared, among other places, in Harper's Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Millions, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013. He is a senior editor of Conjunctions and currently teaches at Bard College.
Praise for The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore:
'We've finally got a book to screech and howl about. Benjamin Hale's audacious first novel is a tragicomedy that makes you want to jump up on the furniture and beat your chest . . . A brilliant, unruly brute of a book.' Washington Post
'A brave and visionary work of genius . . . Touching and quirky . . . A major accomplishment.' San Francisco Chronicle
'Ambitious . . . It throbs with energy and boils with passion as it expresses a dark vision of our essential nature that strikes uncomfortably home.' Los Angeles Times
'Hale's novel is so stuffed with allusions high and low, so rich with philosophical interest, that a reviewer risks making it sound ponderous or unwelcoming . . . It announces that Benjamin Hale is himself a fully evolved as a writer, taking on big themes, intent on fitting the world into his work.' New York Times
'Brilliant. It's a fantastic concept, that something that shares so much of our DNA can have something to say. The book is worth a read for the narrative voice alone - that of Bruno the chimp - who is erudite, arrogant, and more than a bit confused by the emotions humans take for granted.' Jodi Picoult
