Jeff Parker’s characters stumble awkwardly into situations that reveal the darkest sides of themselves: Encountering a female Chechen suicide bomber on a bus ride in Russia, a man finds himself sexually aroused by the terrorist act he’s sure she’ll commit. A father reluctantly accompanies his draft-dodger son to Quebec where he erects an enormous and obscene American flag in his front yard. A character who accidentally swallows a penny during a roadside sobriety test finds himself in a state of existential angst when it stays inside him. The characters in these fifteen voice-driven, comic stories show the trammeled among us, beaten down time and time again, still finding cause in the world for hope.
isbn: 0981248810/9780981248813 | 12.00 cdn/us | 4.75 x 7 inches | 140 pages
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Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman (Tin House Books). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Matrix, Ploughshares, The Walrus, and others. With Mikhail Iossel he edited Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia (Tin House Books) and Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive).
Praise for Jeff Parker’s Writing
“Jeff Parker is a writer who understands that voice is the doorway to all true beauty in fiction. Tight, wry, dark, and deeply funny he is a master of the hyper-compressed sentence that explodes with more meaning and nuance than should be possible. Ovenman is a welcome addition to the literature of the lovably hapless by a young writer with talent to burn.”
—George Saunders, author of Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation
“Mr. Parker has written a weirdly attractive life of people one thought had no life, the pierced and tatted Xtremes. Creepy, convincing, hooty, and fun. The movie will be scary.”
—Padgett Powell, author of Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men
“This excellent novel comes in many flavors, or, better yet, toppings: strip-mall bildungsroman, punk-skater picaresque, comedy of (bad) manners, quasi–love story, service industry send-up, and military-industrial satire, among them…. Parker is a very gifted writer, wise and funny, a worthy night manager of our dreams, and here in Ovenman he’s served up some something uncompromisingly tasty.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land.
