The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“The men in this collection seethe with something close to rage or desperation or both while remaining recognizably and sympathetically human, and that rare combination makes the experience of reading The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men feel as dangerous as a knife fight.”
-Michael Knight, author of The Typist
“Woman can learn more from these stories than from thousands of issues of Cosmopolitan.”
-Ellen Gilchrist, author of Victory Over Japan and Nora Jane
“To read The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men is to know the power and sweep of what short stories can do. These full-bodied, full-throated stories show us men in trouble and men in love, and they show us how those are often one in the same. Prince is a profoundly gifted and muscular writer, a writer who understands the intimacy of violence and the violence of intimacy, a writer you read again and again and again.”
–Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi
“These stories scared the hell out of me.”
-Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of their Lives
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The characters that ricochet through Prince's first book, this collection of short stories, are by turn smug, regretful, jealous, disoriented, angry, and optimistic. Throughout he seeks the coupling of despicable actions and intentions, mining that seedy side of humanity only faintly illuminated by the stubborn hope that we have the power to transcend such ugliness. Prince's stories are both entertaining and insightful, set among strip clubs and marital malaise ("Big Wheels for Adults"), featuring drug addled do-gooders ("Action") and bashful pedophiles ("Island of the Lost Boys"): emotionally- and psychologically-stunted men who long for their mothers to make them good again. However, though the men in his stories are fully rendered, the women tend to be sketches in comparison and at times leave much to be desired. In the midst of Prince's mildly depraved imagination, any morals are, at best, vague, but the stories' best moments hint at, in his words, "Something about how all men deserve punishment just for being what we are."
