Fat Time and Other Stories

by Jeffery Renard Allen

Overview

* LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION *

A ferocious, innovative story collection about Black lives in the past, present, and future

“A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling.”—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred*

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644452394
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/20/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,101,217
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of the novels Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back, the story collection Holding Pattern, and two collections of poetry. He was raised in Chicago and divides his time between Johannesburg and the United States.

Editorial Reviews

04/17/2023

Allen (Rails Under My Back) offers an arresting collection featuring surreal situations along with riffs on the lives of famous Black men. A misty atmosphere pervades the proceedings. The opener, “Testimonial (Supported in Belief/Verified in Fact),” reads like a tall tale, following a man trying to save his son from a lynch mob by hiding the boy inside a cow’s anus. In the title story, Allen imagines an alternate history in which boxer Jack Johnson’s first filmed fight against Tommy Burns becomes a duel to the death. Miles Davis narrates a troubled relationship with a new guitarist in “Pinocchio.” Allen renders the bandleader’s voice with welcome wit and acidity, though he’s less successful with Jimi Hendrix, the star of “Heads,” a plodding misfire that lends little imagination to the revolutionary guitarist’s inner life and leans heavily on descriptions of Hendrix drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, and staring out the window. Though some entries stumble, the author provokes with riveting images, dark humor, and a chilling sense of desperation. When Allen is on, he’s a force to be reckoned with. (June)

Publishers Weekly

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*

"[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

“In Fat Time, Jeffery Renard Allen’s masterful depiction of the Black diaspora and the interior, shadowed lives of African Americans is on full display. From the fantastical and surreal to the darkly comic, each story is like an act of introspection that reveals the hidden spaces within unseen lives—where the unspoken is as loud as the biting utterances of characters pondering ‘the word for choices we cannot forgive.’ Through Allen’s penetrating gaze, we indeed see ‘the world is for everything borned’ in this amazing brew of violence, rage, whimsy, and heartbreaking humor.”—Morowa Yejidé

“Jeffery Renard Allen’s writing in Fat Time and Other Stories is intense, subtle, and astute, rendered with folk wisdom and magical realism. Although his characters face defeat and folly, they not only endure, they often prevail. Allen has never forgotten the importance of ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’ (Faulkner). His themes of destruction and renewal, love and desire, despair and hardship, estrangement and war, and the weight of time itself, are always universal. This is a powerful collection.”—Clarence Major

From the Publisher

★ 2023-03-28
A collection of wildly inventive and intensely realized stories provide electrifying jolts to the very notion of “Black Experience.”

Allen is both a poet and novelist whose prose reverberates with colorful imagery and crystalline lyricism. In his new story collection, he shows greater assurance with plotting and characterization, which only bolsters his agile imagination. In a few pages at a time, Allen can endow even the ghosts of dead children, as in “Four Girls,” with vibrant, combustible, and poignant personalities. In similar fashion, he can persuasively envision real-life personages from the recent past, as in “Heads,” which has rock god Jimi Hendrix hanging out with British painter Francis Bacon somewhere around the disquieting hinge of the 1960s and ’70s, each man reaching for his own transcendence through distortions of time and space. And speaking of space: In “Orbits,” Allen reimagines the near conclusion of Muhammad Ali’s boxing career on a planet Earth with émigrés from the moon helping him prepare for his 1980 bout against Larry Holmes. Other prominent Black men include Jack Johnson, the Ali of his era, who’s tearing through Australia (“Fat Time”), and Miles Davis, gloomily huddled in his Manhattan apartment (“Pinocchio”). Not all of Allen’s characters are famous; “Big Ugly Baby” chronicles the yearslong erotic intimacies between two at-risk teen boys, while in “Fornication Camp,” couples gather at an Illinois religious retreat in a villa moved from Italy and reconstructed piece by piece by Abraham Lincoln. The range of subject matter and the ingenuity of the storylines draw readers in, but it’s Allen’s intricately poetic language that keeps them there, as when he describes Hendrix noodling on his guitar and how he “knows how to worry chords into the black shape of time. Knows how to anchor weight on a string and sink a barbed note into the muddy depths below, then bend that string and yank up a struggling catfish.” The whole collection hums and throbs with such startling craft.

A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling.

Kirkus Reviews