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The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories, by Steve Almond
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Steve Almond, the man whose candy jones fueled the bestseller Candyfreak, returns with a collection of stories that both seals his reputation as a master of the modern form and risks getting him arrested. The cast of characters in The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories includes a wealthy family certain they have been abducted by space aliens, a sexy magazine editor who falls for a worldclass cad, and a beleaguered dentist who refuses to read his best friend’s novel. Michael Jackson and Abraham Lincoln make cameos, as do a variety of desperate and beautiful loonies, all of whom are laid bare, often literally. In these twelve stories, Almond refuses to let his characters off the hook, or to abandon them, until we have seen the full measure of ourselves within their struggle.
- Sales Rank: #1527478 in eBooks
- Published on: 2006-04-28
- Released on: 2006-04-28
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
In this sexy, fast-paced second collection of stories, Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal and the nonfiction Candyfreak, takes on love and loss around the turn of the millennium, showing how average people living in big cities and university towns tackle heartbreak with humor. The title story traces the flailing love between a magazine editor and a commitment-phobic medical resident who seems too good to be true. In "Appropriate Sex," a refreshing addition to the growing genre of stories about the goings-on in undergraduate writing workshops, a writer-in-residence is treated to a parade of students who "discourse on Tristam Shandy," seduce him and get him stoned in the same office hour. "A Happy Dream" portrays the lucky outcome of a blind date on which Kate, a bike messenger masquerading as a chimney sweep, forces Henry, a cautious sous-chef, to think on his feet. While struggling with his own recent breakup, the narrator of "Skull" listens as his friend confesses how he and his new girlfriend are finding love in unlikely ways that involve her prosthetic eye. Almond doesn't dig too deep or offer up grand theories about romantic love, but his easy, natural storytelling and consoling reminders that intimacy is awkward and messy will carry readers happily along. (Apr. 22)Forecast: Almond scored a surprise hit with Candyfreak, his confessional tour of candy factories. This laid-back follow-up delivers more guilty pleasure and should attract—and satisfy—Almond's new fans. Author tour.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Almond hit it big with Candyfreak [BKL F 1 04], his best-selling gonzo travelogue, but his debut, the funny and explicit short story collection My Life in Heavy Metal (2002), had already earned him cult status. Almond proves himself to be just as irreverent, audacious, and amusing in his new set of stories, but his subjects are more diverse, and he manages to be even more sardonic and affecting. The honed-to-perfection title story about a love affair gone wrong is convincingly told from the woman's point of view, while "Appropriate Sex," a tale about a college writing teacher drenched in his students' hectic eroticism, is all male. Going further afield, there's an eerie tale about a family convinced that aliens have tinkered with them; "The Idea of Michael Jackson's Dick," a title that speaks for itself; and an exceedingly strange and provocative vision of a melancholy Abraham Lincoln and an uneasy Frederick Douglass floating down the Mississippi getting tipsy. As out there as Almond gets, he never loses his down-to-earth tenderness and agile delicacy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Always enjoyable, often hysterical."
—New York Times Book Review
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A Recent Convert
By Megan Stewart
I'm normally not a big fan of short stories. I buy anthologies and feel lucky to find one story that doesn't bore me to tears.
So I guess I wasn't too disappointed when I attended a writing conference in New York to find that "The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories" had sold out and all that was left was "Candyfreak." It's hard to be bored by candy.
But I enjoyed reading "Candyfreak," so I tracked down a few of Steve Almond's stories online. Well, OK, several stories. None of which bored me, and a few of which I liked. I felt I owed it to him to buy his book(s).
My personal favorites here were "The Problem of Human Consumption" and "Summer, As In Love." Almond is at his best when writing about star-crossed and otherwise failed love affairs. These stories struck me as more romantic than the ones in his first collection, "My Life In Heavy Metal," which I suspect would have a greater appeal for young men (although I liked "Valentino").
On the lighter side, "The Soul Molecule" was also weirdly enchanting.
I have only a few niggling criticisms. The ending of the title story seemed too dramatic for the story. The main character in "I Am As I Am" seemed too adult in his viewpoint (which may have been intentional). And I won't even go into stallions versus soldering guns.
These were all petty in the scheme of things.
What I really didn't get was "Larsen's Novel." I mean, I (apparently) lead a more sheltered life than Larsen, but from the excerpts I guess his book was about as inspired as my own first endeavor. Is Almond hinting at something here? Like maybe this is why I can't sell my first novel? This is more truth than I'm prepared to handle in my current fragile state.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
"Evil" is Beyond Good
By Voice of Chunk
Steve Almond's obsession to satisfy his sweet tooth fueled the intelligence and humor of 2004's "Candyfreak." It's not surprising, then, that the characters inhabiting the dozen stories in "The Evil B.B. Chow" are "freaks," though of a less carb-addicted variety. Instead of chasing after elusive GooGoo Clusters and Owyhee Butter Toffees, "Chow"'s characters attempt to capture and retain love, redemption, and acceptance. Almond's humanity and empathy -- not to mention his sharp, elegant prose (the final paragraph of the title story could've been cribbed from Fitzgerald); his steady pacing; his handling of occasionally shocking (but never gratuitous) sexual material; and his ability to orchestrate surprising-yet-inevitable character reversals -- make this collection sweeter than "Candyfreak" and weightier than his first story collection, "My Life in Heavy Metal."
Razor-sharp humor balances the book's recurrent failed relationships, deaths, feelings of loneliness and acts of deceit, but Almond's more interested in epiphanies and ambiguity than cheap yucks. Plus, Almond demonstrates that the best humor stems from loss, which means that if we're laughing along with Maureen and Marco (from the title story) over the epithets she's assigned her exes -- "Behind the Music" Man, The Incredible Rowing Man, The Sperminator -- our tone is slightly shameful and nervous because we've all labeled our failures similarly, or, worse, we wonder how we've been labeled.
Ultimately, though, Almond's stories have more to do with the ripple effect of isolated moments than with reductionist labels. In one of the collection's more powerful stories, "I Am As I Am," a single swing of a bat at a pick-up baseball game shows how fate and circumstance can shatter a boy's preconceived notions about security, permanence, community, and self. In "The Problem of Human Consumption," a widower and his daughter simultaneously and silently remember a day with the deceased wife/mother, but from very different perspectives. This memory at once explains the father & daughter's distance and their unspoken connection. "Human Consumption" also contains one of the book's many thematically resonant passages:
"These are the mysteries that consume [Paul] as he sits on his daughter's bed with his hands in his lap. They [the mysteries] matter as much as any of the others, the fact that people die for no good reason, that they choose to hate when love becomes unbearable, that a certain part of them, starved of happiness, gives up, shuts down, goes into hiding."
Where there's hiding there's seeking, and plenty of stories are about seeking for things lost long ago -- usually blind love or blissful naiveté. (In Almond's world the two are synonymous.) Though he keeps intrusions to a minimum, a narrator will occasionally note characters caught in a significant moment as it's happening, flash forward and then note both how the characters interpret the present moment from the future and how the moment impacted the arc of their life. This device is a huge risk because it flirts with one of fiction's deadly sins -- sentimentality. In this regard, Almond is like a trapezist who thrills his audience with feats of ever-increasing danger without ever falling, and this is what makes him an artist of distinction rather than just another talent. A line from "Summer, As in Love" shows that risk is where it's at: "...without risk there [is] no danger and...every story, in the end, is about danger."
Equally impressive is Almond's avoidance of contemporary lit's favorite safety net -- irony -- a pose often used by writers too clever for direct emotion and too distrustful of their audience's ability to distinguish sincerity from schmaltz. "The Idea of Michael Jackson's Dick," a story that takes place on the porch of a house in a "neat little southern city, where [three professors had] come to cash in on the emerging field of Cultural Studies," begs for a little ironic nudging and winking. Putting aside how easy it is to goof on MJ, the blend of tabloid rhetoric ("'He's got a dick...I've seen photos'"), factual errors ("Jackson [was]...beyond traditional categories of truth") and academese ("'Michael Jackson has become dependent on his own mortification...what's known as the Fame-Flagellation Nexus'") might lead you to believe that Almond's commenting on how Ph. D's turn their fetishes into careers. Instead, it's a heartbreaking exploration of the fragility of childhood, of how lost innocence can poison adulthood.
Almond provides the necessary details to create a solid impression in your mind, but leaves enough details out so you're forced to invest parts of yourself. Even after closing the book you'll find yourself dis- and reassembling the stories' pieces again and again, constantly revising your own final version. If this isn't the mark of a great book I don't know what is.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Funny and Deep
By R.L. Maizes
A collection of stories that are funny and deep, surprising and inevitable. Almond's writing is full of heart. The stories will make you think about what it means to be human.
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