Hunger: And Other Stories

By Ian Randall Wilson

Book Overview

In Ian Randall Wilson's first collection, HUNGER AND OTHER STORIES, his characters are driven by intense yearnings for the satisfaction of their most basic human desires. Some want intimacy, others... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967600308
• ISBN13: 9780967600307
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Hollyridge Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Fathers and Sons, Lovers and Losers

I am an editor for the flash fiction eZine Vestal Review, and the publisher and I recently accepted a superb short-short piece by this author. When I found out that he had written a collection, I was intrigued. I bought the book--and I was not disappointed. Ian Randall Wilson is a writer of fierce, compact prose. These are by no means lighthearted tales; they are peopled with dark and falible characters--fathers who give their children object lessons in place of warmth; sons addicted to work, to drugs, to painful relationships; lovers who cannot connect and losers who twitch with an almost obscene humanity. And yet, weighted by Wilson's capability, these stories are readable, memorable and, in some cases, downright fascinating. For the record, the story "I'm Invisible. I'm Safe. I'm Magic" tore my heart out. No romp through the daisies here--the author dishes up the complex messiness of life, and he does it very, very well. (Susan Kramer O'Neill, editor of Vestal Review and author of "Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam")

Lean and vivid as first love

Mama don't let your babies grow up to be short story writers. They'll sleep in the streets and eat out of the back door of the Ding How Chinese restaurant. They'll face enough frustration to try the patience of Job and enough rejection to make them scream hot tears.You've got to suffer to be a real writer of tales, and you've got to identify and empathize with people estranged from the good things in life, and you've got to get it all down on the hard drive in a manner both economical and poetic. And you have to polish and squeeze those words until there is nothing extraneous, and make the finished product look as spontaneous and natural as a first draft. It helps to have a way with words and a gift for spinning a yarn, a keen ear and eye and a BS detector to envy the one Hemingway fancied he carried around. Having all this going for you--and Wilson does--you might, just might get a story published in a lit mag once or twice a year, and maybe once in blue moon, somebody at Esquire or The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker might write you a line saying two or three positive words about your work before the inevitable, "...but not quite right for us."The first story, "A Wire Man" is about a man who still flinches at the sight of his father, a self-made, pip-squeak patriarch, a taciturn, hard as steel, entrepreneur full of prejudice. So, the wire man, divorced by his wife and separated from his son, whom he sees on alternate weekends, sets out on his own to establish a business to prove his worth to himself and the man with a strap, but runs into overload, overwork and the snapping of hungry creditors at his heels. It is a story well-wrought, a little too precious in spots, a story with the good and bad guys perhaps too clearly delineated., and it panders some to the lit mag mentality that demands that the ill, the infirm, the old, the rural or the urban underclass be celebrated, but displays a firm sense of story and a fine resolution.The second story, the title story, is terrific. It is a tale of a man who yearns for love but finds only sex until he spirals down into the love of the lost. It is told with energy, verve, passion, and some cunning, highlighted by a fine turn and a resolution that surprises but is just right. Wilson lets himself go here in "Hunger" and he flies, but his hand is always on the throttle, a pinkie on the wheel, everything balanced and under control, or nearly so--which of course is just right. The hunger is terrific and the prose lean and vivid as first love. A man might write only one such story in his lifetime, but having done so, he is redeemed. Incidentally there is a kind of pleasant and curious critical reflection on page 35 about the previous story, a kind of novelistic streaming together that I think may have been unconscious, the artist weaving his signature.The next story, "Thanksgiving" is about a man's grandfather who is fading away, the founder of a bra-manufacturing company, a man who knows some

Brilliant storytelling. This has prize winner all over it

The two common themes to this fourteen-story collection are (1) relationships are dark and costly; and (2) Ian Randall Wilson is a talented writer. Each one of the terrific tales deals with the path to fulfillment with the end state not always reached and when attained not always worth the price paid to achieve it. The stories are ultra dark, often depressing, especially when the audience, as this critic did, finds themselves reading a tale that could have come from their own diary. The poignant, well-written tales are loaded with depth rarely seen in short stories, turning the reader introspective pondering each story long after finishing them. HUNGER AND OTHER STORIES is a gut wrencher as relationships are explored from a menacing bottom view. The book needs a label "never read late at night (unless one desires nightmares) or when depressed", but clearly Mr. Wilson's anthology is worth reading because the collection is insightful and exciting even if Prozac is required.Harriet Klausner

Spell-Binding Collection Of Short Stories by Ian Wilson!

I was frankly spell-bound by the sheer power of poet and short story essayist Ian Randall Wilson's prose skills as I literally devoured this book last weekend. With a wry and deft scalpel blade, he peels away the layers of skins separating the reader from his unique view of contemporary reality. One is most often reminded of a young Ann Beattie, or at times of John Cheever by Wilson's amazing use of tight and colorful language, which is then deployed to describe ordinary situations with a quite extraordinary flair. This is a collection of stories I plan to read again and again, just for the sheer pleasure of being in the company of an author whose lyrical abilities betray the poet's skill in service to a unique prose style. He uses strong imagery and a range of diverse characters to reveal an emotional and heart-felt orientation to the world he inhabits. To my mind, Wilson combines the best of descriptions with a kind of world-weary cynicism that also has undercurrents one would expect of a failed romantic, an almost schizophrenic somebody who wants and desperately needs to believe, despite all of the evidence of his own experience, that the world is still enchanted. Like Tom Robbins, Wilson's observations can be both funny and caustic, all in the same breathless phrase. These are stories of human beings caught in situations created by their own drives and urges to satisfy life's most basic hungers and desires, of men trying again and again to connect to what is most vital and important to them as individuals. Herein a wide and intimate range of emotions are revealed to the viewer in all their natural human rawness and sensitivities, and Wilson pulls no punches with happy endings or unbelievable twists or turns. Instead, the reader is invited on a busman's tour of the realities of human relations in everyday America, where protagonists cynically keep score of lovers' performances, where accomplishing goals often comes at a high price, and where the fruits of victory are often ashes in the mouths of the victors. The characters are impatient, self-absorbed, and often mean-spirited, but one still cannot help but empathize with the ways in which each is caught by the petard of their own private human frailties. Although Wilson works within the confines of a very different and distinct prose style, I was reminded by these stories of authors John Updike on one hand and Bernard Malamud on the other, and this is due to the fact that like these authors, Wilson seems able to make each of these stories funny, brutal, and surreal, and still make the situations and the characters seem believable. I believe this is the first collection of stories by a very gifted someone we are going to hear a lot more from, and I will not be surprised when Wilson soon joins the ranks of more celebrated and much more widely read authors like those mentioned above. His singular prose style and the unique way in which he colorfully approaches the human dilemma ensure him a long

Brilliantly written

I loved how all of the stories seemed to tie together with the same basic human desire for intimacy in all forms. Getting a glimpse into the way other's view sex and more subtle forms of intimacy made it a very worthwhile read.