The Fat Artist and Other Stories

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 acclaimed 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 hippie 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, threads in the vast tapestry of American life. Weaving a pleasure in the absurd with an exploration of the extraordinary variety of the human condition and the sway our most private selves and hidden pasts hold over us, the stories in The Fat Artist reside in the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation.

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