Keynote
A ferocious, innovative story collection about Black lives in the past, present, and future
Book Title
Fat Time and Other Stories
Cover Image
- “In [Jeffery Renard] Allen’s fashioning, Black experience is never subject to conventional parameters of time and space, and his magic realism, instead of being performatively exuberant or purposefully provocative, is plainly unsettling and disturbing. . . . These are difficult, inventive stories that, at their best, occupy a range of frequencies and otherworldly places with — to borrow Allen’s brilliant three-word description of Jimi Hendrix’s way with music—a ‘fierce itching dazzle.’”—Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times Book Review
Body
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 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.
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Mark Hillringhouse
Praise
- “Fat Time and Other Stories is not only a haunting meditation on Black masculinity in the context of a legacy of violence, but a vivid evocation of the enduring power of the struggle to transcend that legacy. Thought provoking and utterly unique.”—Ladee Hubbard
- “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. . . . 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.”—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. . . . 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
