The Fat Artist and Other Stories - Softcover

Praise for "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore"
"Benjamin Hale is the most talented and intriguing young writer I've met in years. I love his prose, his dialogue, and his balls. Not his actual balls, of course, but the balls to write so ecstatically and with such mad conviction. When I first read the wonderfully comedic The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, I was so pleased to have come across a Writer. A writer with a capital W. Someone who clearly loves books and the power of the written word. It was like, "Ok, here's a guy who's going to be producing novels for years. This is the real deal." It was like being a baseball scout in Oklahoma in the late 1940's and seeing this young kid running around center-field, and you ask the guy next to you, "Who's that?" And the guy says, "I don't know, some kid named Mickey Mantle." Well, that's how I felt, in a literary way, when I read Benjamin Hale for the first time."
-Jonathan Ames, author of" Wake Up, Sir!" and "The Extra Man"
"The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is an enormous, glorious rattlebag of a book. Benjamin Campbell Hale's extremely loud debut has echoes of the acerbic musings of Humbert Humbert and the high-pitched shrieking of Oskar Matzerath. Hale's narrator, Bruno Littlemore, is a loony, yelping, bouncing, pleading, longing, lost, loony, bleeding, pleading, laughing, beseeching wonder. The book is of such enormous originality and vitality; it is the book I feel I have been searching years for but have never yet found, until now."
-Edward Carey, author of "Observatory Mansions" and "Alva & Irva"
"Benjamin Hale is a writer of rare and exciting talent. We'll be reading his books for years. Dive in."
-Anthony Swofford, author of "Jarhead"
"Brilliant. It's a fantastic concept, that something that shares so much of our DNA can have something to say. The book is worth a read for the narrative voice alone-that of Bruno the chimp-who is erudite, arrogant, and more than a bit confused by the emotions humans take for granted."
-Jodi Piccoult, "Newsweek"
"Hale's novel is so stuffed with allusions high and low, so rich with philosophical and literary interest, that a reviewer risks making it sound ponderous or unwelcoming. So let's get this out of the way: "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore "is an absolute pleasure. Much of its pleasure comes from the book's voice..."The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" announces that Benjamin Hale is himself fully evolved as a writer, taking on big themes, intent on fitting the world into his work."
-"The New York Times Book Review"
"From the magic of consciousness to the reifying function of language, the value of art and the morality of science, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" is a brilliant, unruly brute of a book ... When the novel's antics aren't making you giggle, its pathos is making you cry, and its existential predicament is always making you think. No trip to the zoo, western Africa or even the mirror will ever be the same."
-"The Washington Post"
"[The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore] throbs with energy and boils with passion as it expresses a dark vision of our essential nature that strikes uncomfortably home.
-"LA Times"
"["The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore"] is valuable as a book that takes on big ideas: what it means to be human, what it means to be an animal, where language comes from, whether science represents barbarism or progress, and biggest and best of all, whether evolution, that great modern faith of upward propulsion, is instead the world's true curse--the final victory for Milton's Satan....it succeeds in hundreds of sparkling minor moments. Bruno's syntax is always interesting, his diction is full of originality and charm ....we are better for knowing him."
- "New Yorker"
""The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" is a major accomplishment. A lively page-turner that asks the big questions head on and doesn't shy away from controversy, Hale's first novel is a noisy, audacious and promising debut."
-"San Francisco Gate"
"[Bruno's] quest for answers about the agonizing dilemmas of existence that is unexpectedly resonant.
-"Publishers Weekly"
"A stunning debut novel . . . Where the novel should be offensive, it is often tender, and where it should be risible, it is genuinely funny. . . Despite his unlikely erudition, Bruno is by turns fragile, mercurial, spiteful, narcissistic, and lost. All of which, even more than his gift of speech, just makes him that much more human."
-"Entertainment Weekly"
"Bruno Littlemore is one of the most outrageous, vivid characters to populate a page in American fiction in a long time. . . . It's not only a roaring good tale, it's a wonderful musing on the nature of humanness and our relationship to the other species with which we share the planet . . . Hale's sense of humor is often ribald, and the human characters Bruno encounters during his adventures are richly drawn and often eccentric. The descriptions are clearly informed by a deep fondness, and that is the overriding tone of Bruno's narrative: love."
-"The Baton Rouge Advocate"
"One of the more effusive and unrestrained works of fiction in years . . . It's Bruno's voice that gives this novel the complexity and life it deserves. His stories, although not always reliable, are always abundantly full of the mysteries of humanity."
-"Minneapolis Star-Tribune"

"The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is an enormous, glorious rattlebag of a book. Benjamin Campbell Hale's extremely loud debut has echoes of the acerbic musings of Humbert Humbert and the high-pitched shrieking of Oskar Matzerath. Hale's narrator, Bruno Littlemore, is a loony, yelping, bouncing, pleading, longing, lost, loony, bleeding, pleading, laughing, beseeching wonder. The book is of such enormous originality and vitality; it is the book I feel I have been searching years for but have never yet found, until now."
-Edward Carey, author of "Observatory Mansions" and "Alva & Irva"

"Benjamin Hale is a writer of rare and exciting talent. We'll be reading his books for years. Dive in."
-Anthony Swofford, author of "Jarhead"

"Hale's novel is so stuffed with allusions high and low, so rich with philosophical and literary interest, that a reviewer risks making it sound ponderous or unwelcoming. So let's get this out of the way: "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore "is an absolute pleasure. Much of its pleasure comes from the book's voice..."The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" announces that Benjamin Hale is himself fully evolved as a writer, taking on big themes, intent on fitting the world into his work."
-"The New York Times Book Review"

"From the magic of consciousness to the reifying function of language, the value of art and the morality of science, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" is a brilliant, unruly brute of a book ... When the novel's antics aren't making you giggle, its pathos is making you cry, and its existential predicament is always making you think. No trip to the zoo, western Africa or even the mirror will ever be the same."
-"The Washington Post"

"[The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore] throbs with energy and boils with passion as it expresses a dark vision of our essential nature that strikes uncomfortably home.
-"LA Times"

"A stunning debut novel . . . Where the novel should be offensive, it is often tender, and where it should be risible, it is genuinely funny. . . Despite his unlikely erudition, Bruno is by turns fragile, mercurial, spiteful, narcissistic, and lost. All of which, even more than his gift of speech, just makes him that much more human."
-"Entertainment Weekly"

"Benjamin Hale is the most talented and intriguing young writer I've met in years. I love his prose, his dialogue, and his balls. Not his actual balls, of course, but the balls to write so ecstatically and with such mad conviction. When I first read the wonderfully comedic The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, I was so pleased to have come across a Writer. A writer with a capital W. Someone who clearly loves books and the power of the written word. It was like, "Ok, here's a guy who's going to be producing novels for years. This is the real deal." It was like being a baseball scout in Oklahoma in the late 1940's and seeing this young kid running around center-field, and you ask the guy next to you, "Who's that?" And the guy says, "I don't know, some kid named Mickey Mantle." Well, that's how I felt, in a literary way, when I read Benjamin Hale for the first time."
-Jonathan Ames, author of" Wake Up, Sir!" and "The Extra Man"

"Brilliant. It's a fantastic concept, that something that shares so much of our DNA can have something to say. The book is worth a read for the narrative voice alone-that of Bruno the chimp-who is erudite, arrogant, and more than a bit confused by the emotions humans take for granted."
-Jodi Piccoult, "Newsweek"

"["The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore"] is valuable as a book that takes on big ideas: what it means to be human, what it means to be an animal, where language comes from, whether science represents barbarism or progress, and biggest and best of all, whether evolution, that great modern faith of upward propulsion, is instead the world's true curse--the final victory for Milton's Satan....it succeeds in hundreds of sparkling minor moments. Bruno's syntax is always interesting, his diction is full of originality and charm ....we are better for knowing him."
- "New Yorker"

“Oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from” (Los Angeles Times), the stories in The Fat Artist are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.

In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd,

the voices in Benjamin Hale’s The Fat Artist and Other Stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a US congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives that form the vast tapestry of American life.

“A steadily growing...talent” (Kirkus Reviews), Hale’s prize-winning fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling, earning accolades from writers such as novelist Jonathan Ames, who compared discovering his work to watching Mickey Mantle play ball for the first time; Washington Post critic Ron Charles, who declared him “fully evolved as a writer,” and bestselling author Jodi Picoult, who simply called him “brilliant.” Pairing absurdity with philosophical musings on the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation, “the audacious imagination evident in Hale’s acclaimed debut, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, shines again in this...provocative collection that takes a unique view of the human condition” (Booklist).