Dear dead person - Benjamin Weissman

Like some bastard progeny of Nathaniel West, Benjamin Weissman?s stories are savage, graceful, hilarious, and spooky with insights into the myriad quirks that dog nonconformists of every tripe.
In Dear Dead Person, a cross-section of archetypes - teen sex-addicts, would-be rock stars, religious fanatics, serial murderers, and families who make the Menendezes look like Ozzie and Harriet - go about their twisted business in a prose that?s both mimical and anarchic, as American as Raymond Carver, but riven by poetic ruptures that feel like transmissions from the screwed-up part of our collective psyche.

Benjamin Weissman's stories have appeared in BOMB, Santa Monica Review, and VLS.
His critical writing appears regularly in ArtForum and the L.A. Weekly, as well as in European and American exhibition catalogues.
His paintings and drawings are shown at Garelie Krinzinger in Vienna and the Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica.

?Weissman?s first book, Dear Dead Person, is a collection of deadpan, sidesplitting, post-literate - but never boorishly post-modern stories that are like nothing else in contemporary fiction? Spin
?Weissman gathers all that is ugly, vulgar, obscene, scary, disgusting, sick, tragic and sad to create a debut collection that offers a refreshing, nauseating, hilarious deranged take on human nature? Kirkus Reviews
?Weissman?s narrators are the imaginative and articulate perpetrators of an exhaustive catalogue of atrocities...who describe their obsessions, methods and subjects with the sensuous vocabulary of a food critic and report their exploits with the enthusiasm of a child just home from school? New York Times Book Review