Love Letters from a Fat Man

by Naomi Benaron

Price $16.95 paper, 232 pages

ISBN 978-1-886157-60-6

Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize
for Short Fiction
selected by Stuart Dybek

The stories in this debut collection never relax, never loosen their grip, never stop their painful, sparkling insistence that there is something finer, safer, kinder somewhere.

—The Los Angeles Times

Books of short stories—and, for that matter, of poems—can be divided between those that are organized around some unifying principle and those that are collections.  The books that are unified are most commonly unified by place but they can be unified by reappearing characters, by over-arching themes, by variations on a central image, etc.  Each type of book, whether it be linked stories or a collection, has its particular beauties. The collection is by nature diverse and therefore unpredictable, full of surprises or, at least, it can be providing, of course, that the writer’s gifts are up to the task.

Those qualities of diversity, unpredictability, and surprise, and to that list add invention, abound in Naomi Benaron’s collection, Love Letters from a Fat Man.  Each individual story is graced by those same qualities, as well.  As a collection Love Letters from a Fat Man can seem romantic, tragic, comic, lyrical, whimsical, and moody by turns.  The freshness of surprise comes from Naomi Benaron’s powers of invention.  I was especially impressed by how her stories are deeply imagined enough so that the invention always seems credible.  Each voice rings intimate and true.  Each new world created in the compressed length and time of the short story form is vivid and real.  This is a book that is rich in character, detail, and unified by a vibrant prose style and an empathy for its subjects.  What’s more, it is fun to read.   

—from the foreword by Stuart Dybek

Naomi Benaron is fearless.  Her work shines a light into the darkest corners of human existence and, in doing so, helps us both bear witness to atrocity and find hope and healing.  These stories are unflinching and gorgeous--they are stories with a social conscience and a jeweler's craft.  I fee changed, better, for having read them. 

—Gayle Brandeis

Naomi Benaron's stories are tender, knowing, sometimes wicked, often wise, always heartfelt. 

—Brad Kessler

Love Letters from a Fat Man, Naomi Benaron's first collection of stories, establishes her immediately as a writer or tenderness and conscience, of technical skill and acute perception, of broad awareness and finely tuned craft.  What impresses about these stories is virtually everything, from their confident--one might say fearless--reach into strange hearts and foreign cultures, to their intelligent--and never merely clever--construction.  What the reader will take away from these remarkable stories is an appreciation for the redemptive and regenerative power of the human spirit--and an appreciation, too, of Benaron's elegant and redoubtable gifts. 

—Frank X. Gaspar

NAOMI BENARON’S fiction has appeared in CALYX, Red Rock Review, PRISM International Journal, Green Mountains Review, and other in-print and online journals.  She was the winner of the 2005 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition.  Before pursuing her MFA at Antioch University, Los Angles, she worked many years as a geophysicist.  She has lived in Isreal and the West Indes.  Currently she lives in Tuscon, Arizona, with her husband and two dogs.  She teaches writing and geology at Pima Community College and is finishing her first novel.  Love Letters from a Fat Man is her first book.