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Love Without: Stories

by Jerry Stahl

Love Without: Stories Cover

ISBN13: 9781890447458
ISBN10: 1890447455
Condition: Standard
All Product Details

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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A teenage boy's mile-high tryst with a middle-aged widow...
A love affair between a former junkie and an ex-circus midget...
A salacious encounter with the vice president...
The meth-frayed chronicles of a born-again call girl...

In stories of startling breadth and immediacy, Jerry Stahl plumbs the depths of romantic obsession, sex-crazed adolescence, family dysfunction, and other universals of American life. By turns vulgar and tender, wrenching and hysterical, Stahl mines his unique mix of savage humor, unflinching humanity, and unlikely eroticism from the wildest of encounters. Written over the past thirty years, this collection demonstrates why Jerry Stahl's voice remains one of the most vital and uncompromising in contemporary literature.

Review:

"'Stahl's 1995 memoir, Permanent Midnight (detailing his life as a drug-addicted TV writer), and three novels (I, Fatty the most recent), have won him a fan base that shares his glee for the comically deviant, but even his most ardent supporters will be disappointed with this hodgepodge of thin sketches and riffs. Several pieces trade in little more than shock value. 'Bunker Buster,' for instance, details a homosexual tryst with Dick Cheney in the backroom of a Wyoming gun shop. Readers will also meet a hirsute midget with a vegetable fetish, a religiously devout hooker whose creative interpretation of her virginity pledge allows her to work as a prostitute, and a woman who takes her cocaine in an unorthodox manner. These characteristically perverse entries are incongruously offset with more conventional but promising fare: an account of a straitlaced dentist spontaneously running off with a teenaged girl hints at a desire to go beyond the merely eccentric, while the handful of pieces about boyhood are deeply felt, if too slight to satisfy. The book is less a collection of fully conceived stories than a repository for half-baked ideas. (July)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"I had a great time reading this messy book. It's the antithesis of most collections being published these days, those cautious, disciplined efforts that nearly always seek the badge 'a novel in stories.'" Steve Almond, The Los Angeles Times

Review:

"Stahl's brilliantly demented riffs deserved to be read — or screamed — aloud." Entertainment Weekly

Review:

"A better-than Burroughs virtuoso....Stahl has earned the blurbs he's picked up along the way from James Ellroy, Hubert Selby Jr., and Jim Carroll, and has the right to be counted in their skanky, stylish company." Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

Review:

"An unexpected collection of darkly comic, erotic short stories by 'the American hipster bard.'" James Ellory

Synopsis:

From the bestselling author of the memoir Permanent Midnight and the novel I, Fatty comes a long-awaited collection of short stories. Stahl's perverse yet often touching tales plumb the depths of eccentric romance, sex-starved adolescence, mid-life crisis, and family dysfunction.

Synopsis:

From the bestselling author of the memoir Permanent Midnight and the novel I, Fatty comes a long-awaited collection of short stories. Jerry’s Stahl’s perverse, yet often touching tales, many of which first appeared in publications ranging from Playboy to the Pushcart Prize to Best Erotic Fiction, plumb the depths of eccentric romance, sex-starved adolescence, mid-life crisis, and family dysfunction. From a teenager’s tryst with a recently widowed middle-aged woman on an airplane, to a dissatisfied dentist’s attempt to find freedom on the road with a much younger woman, all the way to an intensely erotic love affair between an ex-junkie and an ex-circus midget with a sexual obsession with vegetables, this collection never fails to arouse and surprise. With a disarmingly immediate prose style, Stahl finds great eroticism, humor, and humanity in the wildest of encounters.
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About the Author

Jerry Stahl is the author of the bestselling memoir Permanent Midnight and the novels I, Fatty, Perv — A Love Story, and Plainclothes Naked. He lives in Los Angeles.
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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
Grady Harp, September 30, 2007 (view all comments by Grady Harp)
Outrageous!

Jerry Stahl is a unique writer, one that will shock your socks off, make you feel as though you should put brown paper over the cover of the book so that no one will know you're reading it, and definitely reserve participating in his stories in secret private places. BUT, the man can write short stories more original in content and craftsmanship than most anyone around. This collection of eleven stories covers a large span of his career and when grouped together in the manner in which his publisher has placed them, they shock, entertain, tickle, horrify, and in general provide come of the strangest exploration of human borderline behavior ever written!

Meet Miss Chatty Cheeks, a woman of advanced years who abuses cocaine through an 'original' portal; Doris (an older woman) and early teen virgin Bob and the physical encounter they share in their assigned seats while flying across America; Puray, a chubby blond small person (AKA midget) who has a flair for using braised carrots in a most bizarre fashion; Lorraine and Mr. Carrigan who share an apartment wall with surprises; Vice President Dick Cheney in a sadomasochistic encounter with a fellow gun aficianado in the back room of a guns and ammo shop; and a religiously challenged prostitute convinced her services are acts of charity.

Some would call these stories smarmy at best, but that would be ignoring the superb writing of this fine author. He knows what he is about, loves to tantalize the reader with tales that border on hallucinations, and yet he rounds up these stories with such skill and craftsmanship that they hold the readers blushing attention. He may not be the first author to enter the realm of the bawdy, but he is the equal of many of the greats who have lasted through time with their naughty little tales. He is outrageous AND he is gifted! Grady Harp
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Kenneth, July 15, 2007 (view all comments by Kenneth)
My wife paid Jerry Stahl's Love Without: Stories the ultimate compliment: "Would you stop laughing and turn out the light!?"...followed by, "Stop saying 'Whoa!' and go read it downstairs!" When a short story collection jumps from Dick Cheney, princess phones, and (holy hula Joyce) 'Finnegan's Waikiki,' what's a poor boy to do?
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Product Details

ISBN:
9781890447458
Author:
Stahl, Jerry
Publisher:
Open City Books
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Short stories, American
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Copyright:
2007
Edition Description:
Trade Paper
Publication Date:
July 1, 2007
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Language:
English
Pages:
192
Dimensions:
8.25 x 5.5 in 8 oz
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Related Aisles

Love Without: Stories Used Trade Paper
0 stars - 0 reviews
$2.95 In Stock
Product details 192 pages Grove Press, Open City Books - English 9781890447458 Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review" by , "'Stahl's 1995 memoir, Permanent Midnight (detailing his life as a drug-addicted TV writer), and three novels (I, Fatty the most recent), have won him a fan base that shares his glee for the comically deviant, but even his most ardent supporters will be disappointed with this hodgepodge of thin sketches and riffs. Several pieces trade in little more than shock value. 'Bunker Buster,' for instance, details a homosexual tryst with Dick Cheney in the backroom of a Wyoming gun shop. Readers will also meet a hirsute midget with a vegetable fetish, a religiously devout hooker whose creative interpretation of her virginity pledge allows her to work as a prostitute, and a woman who takes her cocaine in an unorthodox manner. These characteristically perverse entries are incongruously offset with more conventional but promising fare: an account of a straitlaced dentist spontaneously running off with a teenaged girl hints at a desire to go beyond the merely eccentric, while the handful of pieces about boyhood are deeply felt, if too slight to satisfy. The book is less a collection of fully conceived stories than a repository for half-baked ideas. (July)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Review" by , "I had a great time reading this messy book. It's the antithesis of most collections being published these days, those cautious, disciplined efforts that nearly always seek the badge 'a novel in stories.'"
"Review" by , "Stahl's brilliantly demented riffs deserved to be read — or screamed — aloud."
"Review" by , "A better-than Burroughs virtuoso....Stahl has earned the blurbs he's picked up along the way from James Ellroy, Hubert Selby Jr., and Jim Carroll, and has the right to be counted in their skanky, stylish company."
"Review" by , "An unexpected collection of darkly comic, erotic short stories by 'the American hipster bard.'"
"Synopsis" by , From the bestselling author of the memoir Permanent Midnight and the novel I, Fatty comes a long-awaited collection of short stories. Stahl's perverse yet often touching tales plumb the depths of eccentric romance, sex-starved adolescence, mid-life crisis, and family dysfunction.
"Synopsis" by ,
From the bestselling author of the memoir Permanent Midnight and the novel I, Fatty comes a long-awaited collection of short stories. Jerry’s Stahl’s perverse, yet often touching tales, many of which first appeared in publications ranging from Playboy to the Pushcart Prize to Best Erotic Fiction, plumb the depths of eccentric romance, sex-starved adolescence, mid-life crisis, and family dysfunction. From a teenager’s tryst with a recently widowed middle-aged woman on an airplane, to a dissatisfied dentist’s attempt to find freedom on the road with a much younger woman, all the way to an intensely erotic love affair between an ex-junkie and an ex-circus midget with a sexual obsession with vegetables, this collection never fails to arouse and surprise. With a disarmingly immediate prose style, Stahl finds great eroticism, humor, and humanity in the wildest of encounters.
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