Synopses & Reviews
From the bestselling author of the memoir Permanent Midnight and the novel I, Fatty comes a long-awaited collection of short stories. Jerrys Stahls 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 teenagers tryst with a recently widowed middle-aged woman on an airplane, to a dissatisfied dentists 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.
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
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.
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.
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.