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Published Jul 2020
160 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Voiced by an off-kilter chorus of the young and desperate to belong, Benjamin Nugent's provocative collection pries the fraternity door off its hinges, daring us to peer inside with amusement, horror, and also love.
In a Massachusetts college town stands a dilapidated colonial: Delta Zeta Chi. Here, we meet Newton, the beloved chapter president; Oprah, the sensitive reader; Petey, the treasurer, loyal to a fault; Claire, the couch-surfing dropout who hopes to sell them drugs; and a girl known, for unexpected reasons, as God. Though the living room reeks of sweat and spilled beer, the brothers know that to be inside is everything.
Fraternity celebrates the debauched kinship of boys and girls straddling adolescence and adulthood: the drunken antics, solemn confessions, and romantic encounters that mark their first years away from home. Beneath each episode lies the dread of exclusion. The closeted Oprah's hero worship gives way to real longing. A combat veteran offers advice on hazing. An alienated young woman searches for a sanctuary. And the shadow of assault hovers over every sexual encounter.
"This is a book about the awkward, awful passage between adolescence and adulthood and about the way these unwary, ill-prepared boys negotiate it, or try not to. Nugent manages—the mark of the master satirist—to be simultaneously compassionate and ruthless. Splendid." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Nugent commendably weaves humor and drama to shine an unflinching light on the young adults convening behind fraternity walls. One can almost smell the stale beer on the page." - Publishers Weekly
"If university is where we finally grow up, what role does the college campus play in creating the adult American man? In these dark, witty, and sharply written stories, Benjamin Nugent takes an unflinching look at that strange tradition, the all-male fraternity, which, in his gifted hands, begins to look like a very strange and insidious social experiment. Take a boy, transform him into a 'bro,' and then release into the wild…" - Zadie Smith, author of Grand Union
"Reading Benjamin Nugent's stories doesn't resemble any other experience I can think of―the paragraphs of Fraternity pivot easily from mantra to gut punch to slapstick to heartbreak, sometimes swelling into tenderness so acute it makes me avert my eyes, it feels so private and human and true." - Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering
"This striking, intimate book is not what it seems. Very funny, and ostensibly about Greek life, with its Kappas, Deltas, disgusting kitchens, and pregaming, it holds at its center a small bomb of realism. Here we have the terror of privileged young people facing uncertain financial futures who find themselves involved with other young people unsheltered by college and all its mythologies. Strangely―for a collection called Fraternity―it is the young women who shimmer in recollection." - Mona Simpson, author of Casebook
"A lovely sequence of stories, moving, dark, and funny." - Emma Cline, author of The Girls
This information about Fraternity was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Benjamin Nugent is the winner of the Paris Review's 2019 Terry Southern Prize. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review. He has written for n+1, the New York Times Magazine, Time, and other publications. He is the author of the novel Good Kids and the nonfiction book American Nerd.
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