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by Jeffery Renard Allen
A ferocious, innovative story collection about Black lives in the past, present, and future.
In Fat Time and Other Stories, Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with them are characters of Allen's invention: two teenagers in an unnamed big city who stumble through a down-low relationship; an African preacher visits a Christian religious retreat to speak on the evils of fornication in an Italian villa imported to America by Abraham Lincoln; and an albino revolutionary who struggles with leading his people into conflict.
The two strands in this brilliant story collection―speculative history and tender, painful depictions of Black life in urban America―are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once. Here the natural and supernatural, the sacred and the profane, the real and fantastical, destruction and creation are held in delicate and tense balance. Allen's work has been said to extend the tradition of Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Henry Roth, and Ishmael Reed, but he is blazing his own path through American literature. Fat Time and Other Stories brilliantly shows the range and depth of his imagination.
"A collection of wildly inventive and intensely realized stories provide electrifying jolts to the very notion of 'Black Experience'.... A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Allen] provokes with riveting images, dark humor, and a chilling sense of desperation...he's a force to be reckoned with." ―Publishers Weekly
"Reading Jeffery Renard Allen's Fat Time and Other Stories feels like free-falling, tumbling, spiraling headlong into stark new worlds and fever dreams. Allen's characters––restless and rebellious, famous and infamous––draw you in with the force of their longings, fears, and blues. These stories are eclectic, electric and endlessly imaginative." ―Deesha Philyaw
"Fat Time and Other Stories, Jeffery Renard Allen's impressive new collection, takes the reader on a series of journeys spanning time, place, and souls. Whether imagining a band of albinos in revolt or a life-triptych featuring Jimi Hendrix and Francis Bacon, life under a mysterious (though now quite recognizable) quarantine or passages in the lives of greats Miles Davis and Muhammad Ali, Allen's array of storytelling gifts and his skill at bringing characters to life never fail to amaze. Luxuriate in these masterful sentences, lose yourself in these Black stories, 'the shape of dreams...the shape of the blues...the shape of listening.'"―John Keene
This information about Fat Time and Other Stories 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.
Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of the novel Rails Under My Back and two collections of poetry. Allen was born and raised in Chicago. He teaches creative writing at Queens College/CUNY, and his awards include a Whiting Award.
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