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.

The arresting and brilliantly original collection of short stories from the prize-winning and bestselling author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. 'An absolute pleasure' (New York Times)

About the Author

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

Reviews
Benjamin Hale writes from an altitude that is entirely his own. The view from up there - a hilariously zoological panorama of Americans at their most frail, feral, and blundering - is also entirely his own. The Fat Artist is a brilliant, ceaselessly engaging book. -- Joseph O'Neill
From Morocco to Montana, and include the tale of the U.S. congressman who expires during a tryst in a hotel room and the adventures of an addict who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid . . . Dazzling. * Daily Mail *
Hale reveals himself to be a virtuoso . . . [His] prose is so enjoyable. * Times Literary Supplement *
From an artist who nearly eats himself to death to a woman who accidentally feeds her baby hallucinogenics . . . Fascinating. * Independent *
[An] excellent new story collection . . . Hale's writing is measured and expansive at the same time; he constructs beautiful but never showy sentences. He has the capacity to shock, but he doesn't abuse it; even his oddest stories seem believable, and that's largely due to the care he puts into creating his imperfect, memorable characters . . . Some of them are about to die; some of them have to face up to the long, complicated lives ahead of them. Hale treats all of them with care, and like the flare of a satellite that will one day decay and crash back down to Earth, it's oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from. * Los Angeles Times *
Fascinating tales that cover a huge range of characters, who will linger in your mind long after you've put down the book. * Press Association *
Hale's well-hewn, often violent tales are saturated with sadness and full of strange, marginal folk, but the thoughts, desires, and failures of these oddball characters are acutely recognizable . . . the reader comes away grateful for the sincerity of their melancholy quests to find meaning, love, and the purposes of their ill-fated lives . . . This book is at once absurd, morbid, melancholy, ridiculous, and disturbing. * Publisher's Weekly (starred review) *
Generous, unfolding at a decidedly unhurried pace, the stories in The Fat Artist seem at first to be so precise in the portraits they draw and so specific in their emotional concerns that it takes a while to recognize the fine strands connecting them to American history, culture, and everyday life, strands that will ensnare the lucky readers of this collection as well. Benjamin Hale's writing has range, depth, soul, and music. -- Christopher Sorrentino, author of The Fugitives and Trance, a finalist for the National Book Award


Awards
Long-listed for International Dylan Thomas Prize 2017 (UK).



Book Information
ISBN 9781509830312
Author Benjamin Hale
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Picador
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 211g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 130mm * 18mm