Book Cover Image of Fat Time and Other Stories by Jeffery Renard Allen

Fat Time and Other Stories
by Jeffery Renard Allen

    Publication Date: Jun 20, 2023
    List Price: $16.00
    Format: Paperback, 288 pages
    Classification: Fiction
    ISBN13: 9781644452394
    Imprint: Graywolf Press
    Publisher: Graywolf Press
    Parent Company: Graywolf Press

    Description of Fat Time and Other Stories 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 preachervisits a Christian religious retreat to speak on the evils of fornication in an Italian villa importedto 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.