The Fat Artist and Other Stories, Benjamin Hale
The Fat Artist and Other Stories, Benjamin Hale
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The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Author: Benjamin Hale

Narrator: James Patrick Cronin

Unabridged: 9 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/17/2016


Synopsis

Prize-winning author Benjamin Hale's fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.

As in his debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, the voices in these stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a U.S. congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives that form the vast tapestry of American life.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kumar on August 12, 2018

A few years back I was obsessed with Chuck Palahniuk, and when I had read everything he had put out, I started reading books that belonged to the transgressional genre. During this time, I ended up reading a lot of one-hit wonders. Authors who had that one great book and then disappeared — at least......more

Goodreads review by Penny on March 30, 2016

The Fat Artist by Benjamin Hale is a five star read! I will start off by saying that I don't read many short story collections and it isn't because I don't find them enjoyable. For me, short stories often end too soon, just as I'm getting to know the characters, just as I'm beginning to crawl inside......more

Goodreads review by Audra (ouija.reads) on September 08, 2016

Full review with a cuddly surprise here: [URL not allowed]-... There is something about reading a short story that really gives you a feel for someone's ability as a writer. I think it has to do with the space, or the lack thereof. In a novel, there's room to hide inadequacies, to......more

Goodreads review by Latkins on July 02, 2016

This is a brilliant collection of short stories by an American author. Each one features characters who are flawed and yet still likeable. There is quite a high body count, death seems to feature prominently in this work, and yet it's also quite funny at times. The title story sees a modern artist p......more

Goodreads review by tyto on February 19, 2016

I received this from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. First of all, I kinda hate the cover, so I was glad that I was reading this as an ebook rather than in a physical copy, because this is one that would get strange looks in public. The stories in this collection are full of strange, flaw......more