"This debut novel from memoirist Chase (The Hurry-up Song) begins with the capture and wounding by a SWAT team of the eponymous, sentient teddy bear in a backwoods cabin; the team thinks it has captured a mad bomber. In jail, Winkie, who no one denies is a teddy bear, must contend with cruel jailers; his stuttering, court-appointed lawyer named Unwin; the 9,678 counts of everything from treason to witchcraft he's charged with; and the intersection of his life with that of the previous possessor of the cabin, an old humanities professor whose bombs never worked. While marking time, Winkie contemplates his past: his ownership by the Chase family, his loneliness when on a shelf , his magical awakening to life one morning — marked by a bowel movement so lovingly described that it recalls Bloom's in Ulysses. The sections devoted to Winkie's trial is a minor masterpiece of ridiculousness, in which the prosecution's move to end the trial after it has presented its side sounds uncomfortably close to what we read in the newspapers. This book is way too odd to be sentimental, and its political sensibility shuttles easily between the cartoonish and the shrewd. Chase puts himself in the same league as David Sedaris with this unclassifiable debut. (July)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"A masterfully measured social critique featuring a protagonist as endearing as any from the classics of childhood literature." Carl Hays, Booklist (starred review)

"Chase makes this out-of-left-field story work brilliantly; a funny and sweet yet seriously topical novel." Kirkus Reviews

"Winkie is not a book for every taste....But there's a wonder here, a hopefulness that combines with a good sense of timing to make reading this book a very pleasant experience." San Francisco Chronicle

"When Chase isn't overplaying the cute card, he's obsessed with bodily functions." USA Today

"Stuffed bears, even bears of very little brain, have lives of their own, as Clifford Chase demonstrates in this thoughtful, funny, bittersweet chronicle of the adventures of Winkie, a Teddy charged with being a terrorist." Hartford Courant

"Chase turns in a masterfully measured social critique featuring a protagonist as endearing as any from the classics of childhood literature." Booklist

In Chase's scathingly funny and surprisingly humane debut novel, the zeitgeist assumes the form of a one-foot-tall ursine Everyman — a mild-mannered teddy bear named Winkie who comes to life and finds himself on the wrong side of America's war on terror.

Clifford Chase is the author of The Hurry-Up Song, a memoir of his brother's death, and the editor of Queer 13: Lesbian and Gay Writers Recall Seventh Grade. His fiction has appeared in various magazines and literary journals. Winkie is his first novel, and was inspired by the actual Winkie, who was passed down by the author's mother and is now at least eighty years old and quite mangy.