The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories

by Steve Almond

Overview

Steve Almond, the man whose candy jones fueled the bestseller Candyfreak, returns with a collection of stories that both seals his reputation as a master of the modern form and risks getting him arrested. The cast of characters in The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories includes a wealthy family certain they have been abducted by space aliens, a sexy magazine editor who falls for a worldclass cad, and a beleaguered dentist who refuses to read his best friend's novel. Michael Jackson and Abraham Lincoln make cameos, as do a variety of desperate and beautiful loonies, all of whom are laid bare, often literally. In these twelve stories, Almond refuses to let his characters off the hook, or to abandon them, until we have seen the full measure of ourselves within their struggle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565125292
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	04/28/2006
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	4.98(w) x 7.08(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Steve Almond has published over one hundred stories and poems-in publications ranging from Playboy to Tin House to Zoetrope—and a two previous collections of stories, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow. He is the author of the bestselling novel Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“With his energy and restraint, [Almond] shows the strange, utterly true, believable weirdness of our times, in riveting, clean, funny, diamond-bright prose.” – Matt Klam

Editorial Reviews

"Always enjoyable, often hysterical."
—New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

Nobody today is writing better short fiction.

Seattle Times

"Always enjoyable, often hysterical."
—New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

Almond is an incredibly seductive writer: A gifted storyteller, he hooks you on the first page and keeps the thrills coming.

People Magazine

Sa-weet! In his second story collection, the author of last year’s nonfiction hit Candyfreak delivers a lively Whitman’s Sampler of offbeat tales worth savoring—if you don’t devour the entire dozen in one sitting.

Entertainment Weekly

Weird boyfriends, bad novels, sexually perverse collegiates. Almond, author of the collection My Life in Heavy Metal (2002) and the nonfiction Candyfreak (2003), has a nice treasure trove of ideas and a smart way with his characters, but he always seems to lose interest just as the going gets good. The title story is a good example. Here, an editor at a women's magazine starts a relationship with an odd, short little doctor whom she's powerfully attracted to despite his childlike tendencies and bedroom ineptitude. The affair goes seriously sour when she meets Chow's ex and uncovers some secrets; but Almond had an interesting start here, slyly inverting the chick-lit setup with the narrator's caustic and unsentimental running commentary. It's too bad he truncates it. Sex is a constant theme, especially in the funny, lascivious teacher-gone-errant "Appropriate Sex" ("This was a Friday in April, one of the last days of the term, and the undergrads were all worked up"). What happens (neurotically slutty student comes on hard to her writing professor, who ends up just sharing a joint with one of the dimmer bulbs in the class) is less important than Almond's sarcastic limning of the none-too-impressive undergrads the teacher is forced to endure. The masterpiece is "Larsen's Novel," about a man with an impossibly pushy best friend, Larsen, who agrees to read that friend's novel, a 600-page pile of execrable cliche, soon regretting his decision (another reader: "Surely [it was] a labor of love . . . So, too, was the Third Reich"). Almond strains for source material at times-see the lazy bull session that makes up "The Idea of Michael Jackson's Dick"-and may not include much of great consequence,but the effortless humor throughout compensates for a lot. A distractingly entertaining second collection, nimbly executed. Author Tour

Kirkus Reviews