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The Horrible Humour & Other Stories Sorry, this book is no longer available |
The Horrible Humor & Other Stories is a wildly modern collection of short stories, ranging from a story about contestants on a reality TV program to near-future sci-fi. Jamie Allen's charming style is able to skewer pop-culture on a literary spit, leaving it to slow roast in his off-kilter imagination.
Let's take, for example, Sharkie Simpson Needs A Publicist, the tale of a blood thirsty shark-slash-celebrity who has a PR crisis while shopping for steaks in the grocery store when he realizes that his, shall we say, less than heroic actions have caused his popularity to plummet. Ringing any bells? This is the beauty of Allen's writing -- this is pop culture like you always wanted it to be; sharks in cars, brain controlling radios, reality tv gameshows where the goal is "to climb the Chrysler Building, utilizing suction cups and a dental floss harness, while NBC Challengers lean out windows and use eye droppers to drip bird poop on our heads and faces."
Is it any wonder then that Neal Pollack, author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature has proclaimed Jamie Allen "the most important American author alive?" Or that Eyeshot editor, Lee Klein, gushed "Buy The Book ... stories that may remind readers (if they were driving) of some pop-fiction reststop between DFW & George Saunders (if they were cities instead of authors) - Mr. Allen's reststop is smart & funny & sort of nicely deals with how the modern mediated man (the stories are mainly about men, although one is about a shark) deals with shit, especially old-fashioned concerns like dealing with other people - Recommendation: Buy!"
Jamie Allen's "What I Did With My Dot-Com Severance" at Radio Rock Stars.
Read about Jamie's Horrible Humour Bus Tour through downtown Atlanta, Georgia