titles / Rabbit Punches by Jason Ockert
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“Rabbit Punches marks the debut of an exciting new American talent.”
—George Saunders
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Rabbit Punches
stories
by Jason Ockert
Trade Paperback
Price: $13.00
184 pages / 5.5X8.5
ISBN 0-9723363-5-4
Pub. Date: April 2006
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Riotously funny, beautifully written, and charged with emotional intelligence, this well-crafted debut investigates the world from the fringe through characters who stray so far from convention they seem to inhabit another universe. Whether it’s Alston Goldstein ferrying drugs around Florida on his yellow moped, a young man fi ghting his entire neighborhood to find a suitable husband for his pregnant sister, or a man preparing to arm wrestle Jesus, these 13 stories hinge on the interplay between middle-class normality and capricious heroes, transporting readers to a tenderly evoked world where the real and the absurd at last make peace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jason Ockert has won several national fiction awards and his stories have appeared in many journals, including The Oxford American, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, and McSweeney’s. His work is included in the 2007 anthologies New Stories from the South and Best American Mystery Stories. He teaches in the English Department of Coastal Carolina University.
“The writing is hip but not terminally hip, fun, at times very fun, and contains signs that the author is disturbed enough to be worth watching. He may tell us some new things.”
—Padgett Powell
“Ockert forges a comic dialectic of alienation and integration in this quirky southern universe.”
—Mary Caponegro
“Crack scribbler Jason Ockert hits the ground running with this mordant knee-slapper.”
—J. Robert Lennon
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