Hunger and Other Stories - Softcover

Wilson, Ian Randall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0967600308 ISBN 13: 9780967600307

Publisher: Hollyridge Press, 2000

Synopsis

In his first collection of short stories, Wilson's characters are driven by a intense yearning for satisfaction of the most basic human desires. These are stories of fathers and sons who cannot get along, of impossible family gatherings where no one measures up, of intensely sexual relationships gone bad, and of the devastation of drugs.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Ian Randall Wilson has published stories in many prestigious publications. Novelist Chuck Rosenthal said of this collection, "There is a hint of Malamud here, and Roth, where reality tilts under its own weight and becomes suddenly humorous, suddenly surreal, suddenly painful." It was that strangeness, the mix of emotions deeply felt coupled with a great facility for language that drew us to publish Wilson's first collection.

From the Author:

I wrote the stories in HUNGER over the span of a dozen years and they represent some of my earliest work as well as some of my most recent. I've spent half my life in New England, and the other half in Los Angeles working in the film business. These contrasting locations produce a constant tension which I've tried to reconcile in the writing. For me, relationships are the issue in these stories, how far off their rails they can go.

When I sit down to write -- and I try to write at least a page and a half a day -- I don't know what I'm going to write about. I don't outline and I don't plan. I don't want to appear pretentious here, but for me, literary fiction isn't about plot or about "what happens," it's about language and character. I leave the planning to the popular writers. I'll read a book and an event in the text will spark something in me. Sometimes an overheard conversation, a story on the news or in the paper -- any of those can be the trigger. Sometimes I think about the opposite of what actually happened and see how far I can take things. I write my page and a half and I'm done. It can take ten minutes or several hours. You'd be amazed how much material accumulates by keeping to that schedule.

People ask me, "How much of it is true? Did this really happen?" Maybe readers want to make some connection with the people they're reading about. Maybe it's the sense of "there but for the grace of God..." I can tell you that some of the stories in HUNGER have autobiographical underpinnings. My father did own a factory in East Boston that resembles the one in "A Wire Man" though not as Gothic. My late grandfather owned a brassiere factory as does the patriarch in "Thanksgiving," though afflicted with Parkinson's, he was mentally sharp until his last day. But did I actually keep a running tally of my lovers as does Rick in the title story "Hunger"? Is it possible I'm that kind of man?

To read my fiction and poetry and decide it's about my life is to believe that I am an only child, that I am the oldest of two children, of a family of five, of seven, that my father is dead, that my father left my family, that my father is completely healthy and a marathon runner, that my parents are divorced, that my father smokes, that my parents hate each other, that I am a violist in a symphony orchestra, that I was once in a rock band in the 60s, that I have children, that I have no children, that I have killed what children I had. For me, writing is most interesting as a way of imagining, as a way of working with language, playing with it, if you will. I used to think that I wrote to understand myself. But as I've gotten older I've found so much that's absurd in the world that now I write to point out or at that absurdity. Still in many ways, these stories in HUNGER are some of the most personal I've written.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hollyridge Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0967600308
• ISBN 13: 9780967600307
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200