Fat Time and Other Stories, Jeffery Renard Allen
Fat Time and Other Stories, Jeffery Renard Allen
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Fat Time and Other Stories

Author: Jeffery Renard Allen

Narrator: Diontae Black

Unabridged: 8 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/22/2023


Synopsis

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 who 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.

About Jeffery Renard Allen

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Janalyn, the blind reviewer on June 19, 2023

If no one has said it yet let me be the first Jeffrey Rennerd Allen is a word Smith his writing style is to die for while reading the stories I couldn’t wait to see what he wrote next not only because the stories were interesting but the way he words himself is phenomenal the first story is a man wh......more

Goodreads review by Gurldoggie on November 24, 2024

Imaginative stories of love, violence and perseverance in contemporary Black lives. Many of the stories make use of fantastic elements, fictionalized versions of famous figures or subtly warped visions of the near future, to great effect. The best of the stories are inspired, reaching profound emoti......more

Goodreads review by Craig on February 03, 2024

Allen works best for me at novel length--Rails Upon My Back is classic. But there's plenty here to command attention, especially "Four Girls," and "Heads," which takes Jimi Hendrix to places that you have to believe he would have appreciated.......more