FROM THE PUBLISHER

In his first collection of stories, Stephen Dobyns, peerless chronicler of the menace and unease that lurk in small-town America, turns his attention to the dark, inescapable forces that test the patience, fidelity, and even good sense of the most ordinary people.

The sixteen stories in Eating Naked -- two of which appeared in The Best American Short Stories--range from surreal to poignant, from chilling to comic. At the center of them all are men and women challenged by their own uncontrollable, illogical natures: poets with free-floating guilt, spouses with unacceptable sexual compulsions, farmers with midlife crises, gas men with erratic timetables. Marriages unravel, well-laid plans dissolve, and placid lives are turned upside down by something unforeseen--be it as mundane as a chance conversation, as inevitable as death, as improbable as a murderous pig.

Now writing in a new form, Dobyns once again reveals his psychological acuity and grasp of social frailty. Sharp, funny, and profound, Eating Naked gets to the heart of a world in which order and reason rarely prevail over human peculiarity and longing for the astonishing and the unexpected.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

While Dobyns has written 20 novels (The Church of Dead Girls) and 10 books of poetry (Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides), this is his first story collection, and he proves himself an adept at the form. In these 16 tales he unveils a landscape of adultery, divorce, abandonment--a vista of dysfunctional relationships in which domestic bliss is rare and dark humor flourishes. In "A Happy Vacancy," a man is killed by a falling pig. After his bizarre, well-publicized death, his widow, a professor named Harriet, finds people chuckling whenever she enters the room. She quits her job, moves to the Midwest and tries to put the strange event into perspective: "For her, death had become a joke, a dreadful buffo, and she needed to make it big again." In "Part of the Story," a 63-year-old waitress prepares to meet, for the first time, her five children (each the product of a backseat or motel-room affair, each given up for adoption). The reunion is complicated by her latest lover, Burt--sitting dead in her bedroom, stricken by an in flagrante heart attack. Other stories feature a cuckolded poet who tries to get revenge by kidnapping his wife, only to be cut to the quick by her insults, and a gas man who breaks his leg while reading a meter and gets stuck in long conversation with a cruel man caring for his dying wife. What keeps these stories fresh, despite the regularity of misfortune, are Dobyns's deadpan humor and his characters' wry, unpredictable personalities, plus the sheer oddity of their dilemmas. Despite the often wretched combinations of hope, failure and pride experienced by Dobyns's characters, readers will be moved with compassion for their vigorously human lives. (May) FYI: Stories from this collection have appeared in the 1996 Pushcart Anthology and the 1995 and 1999 Best American Short Stories. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

The 20 novels and ten collections of poetry penned by Dobyns represent a hefty oeuvre. Eating Naked is this master writer's collection of short stories. Pushing the boundaries of the genre, Dobyns writes in a natural, compelling, and convincing voice about ordinary people and people on the edge. In the title story, a disenchanted young man hits and kills a deer with his pickup truck, changing the lives of three people forever. "A Happy Vacancy" presents the farcical situation of an esteemed poet meeting his death when a pig falls from a helicopter overhead and crushes him. His bereft widow and sons must face the snickering of townspeople, who view his death as a joke. "Cynthia, My Sister" is the story of a charming misfit's attempts to connect with his father. Two of the 16 stories appeared in Best American Short Stories (in 1995 and 1999). These are tales that live on in the reader's mind. Recommended for all libraries.--Mary G. Szczesiul, Roseville P.L., Fraser, MI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Broun - Times Literary Supplement

The fact is, Dobyns is a delightful storyteller, rising to the artistic challenges offered by a host of often fanatically obsessive characters...deeply inscribed with a conscious, and very complex, artistry.

Gary S. Kadet - The Boston Book Review

Dobyns may be the most penetrating current observer of the underlying horror of middle American life.

Susan Balee - Chicago Tribune