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Tax-exempt? | Ate It Anyway In "Celibacy-by-the-Atlantic," Phil negotiates a lingering, low-intensity regret brought on by the annual family get-together at his parents' beach house, where memories of his aimless, privileged adolescence mingle with forebodings of his aimless, privileged middle age. In "A Lover's Guide to Hospitals," Carl lies in bed, pining over a stillborn romance through a moody, post-op haze of painkillers. As a consoling needle through the heart, the object of Carl's unrequited affections also turns out to be his nurse. In "Burt Osborne Rules the World," a precocious boy ponders his childhood in "a world protected against anything you could imagine doing to make it more interesting." Sensing that only more of the same awaits him as an adult, Burt charts a different course-as a class clown with a truly toxic sense of mischief. Others, like Lydia in "Ralph Goes to Mexico," assert their individuality more effortlessly, for they're just too naturally odd to be cowed by convention. Lydia's dilemma is whether she should have her leukemic cat stuffed and mounted or turned into a hat after he dies. These lyrical tales celebrate the ordinary-and the not so ordinary-with a flourish of Nabokovian wit that combines grandeur, kitsch, and the author's broad empathy with his characters. Ed Allen, an associate professor of English at the University of South Dakota, has also worked as a taxi driver, butcher, and salesman. Allen's novel Mustang Sally has been adapted into a film, Easy Six. September 2003 ISBN 0820325589 cloth • $24.95 193 pp. • 5 1/4 x 8 in.A volume in the seriesThe Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction "I don't know another writer quite like Ed Allen . . . brilliant, offbeat . . . an insider giving us the lowdown on American life." —Antonya Nelson, author of Female Trouble "Ed Allen is a genius at rendering the second-rate colleges, chain hotels, and franchise restaurants of America's suburbs and Flyover. Amidst all the shrink-wrap and cinderblock and artificial grass, he conjures up people and incidents who leave him (and us) terribly sad, hilariously amused, and, quite often, suffused with unbearable wonder and longing. This is a long-overdue collection from an exceptionally imaginative writer." —Thomas Mallon, author of Henry and Clara"In this collection of seventeen stories-winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction-memory is potent, senses are sharp, and insight is keen. . . . what lingers are Allen's succinct word pictures and vividly crystallized moments."-Michele Leber, Booklist "They have such an irresistible voice and such a rich rhythm of observation they transform the mere stuff of the external world into shimmering significance . . . What motivates Ed Allen's characters is often puzzling and perverse, and therefore strangely familiar and powerfully irresistible to us."-Charles E. May, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "I don't know another writer quite like Ed Allen. To read Ate It Anyway is to ride the stream of a cool and quirky consciousness, a torrent of surprising particulars. Allen is brilliant, offbeat, his own man, an insider giving us the lowdown on American life from the fresh perspective of a guy who seems newly arrived in a flying saucer."-X. J. Kennedy, author of The Lords of Misrule: Poems, 1992-2001"Ed Allen writes in a rich, hearty style about middlebrow Americans living lives of spiritual and cultural improverishment. In case you missed my point, that's three areas of value bound up together: wealth, mediocrity, and poverty. Would the reader expect the resulting brew to be a disaster? Far from it. Allen zeroes in on the particulars of our shared culture with a perspective that reminds me of nothing so much as the pop-influenced writing of the New Journalists of the late 1960s; the early work of Tom Wolfe comes to mind."-Freddy Bosco, Bloomsbury Review "Ed Allen's razor-edged detail and startling imagery cast an aggregate spell. . He is a master of narrative voice. . Allen's stories seethe with toxic kitsch, offbeat humor, dark tension, and an unbearable longing that will gnaw at you weeks afterward."-North Dakota Quarterly "Ed Allen's quirky stories impact finally a radiant theme: the daily world is not prosaic but always recrudescing and beckoning us to do the same. From moment to moment it bares itself afresh for those of us who, however lost or bereft, can, like Allen's protagonists, open the valves of consciousness."-Philip Bufithis, Antietam Review "Darkly funny stories set solidly in the central emptiness of the middle-class struggle."-Sharon, PA Herald, January 25, 2004 |
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