The Littlest Hitler - Stories [Hardcover]

Ryan Boudinot (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2006

Bette Wore What I Had Come To Secretly Call Her Star Trek uniform, a hideous white suit jacket with too-pointy collars. From her face hung a beard of bees. Everyone's seen these things on TV or in National Geographic. Some farmer standing shirtless in his field, a stalactite of writhing insects dangling from his grinning face. But on Bette, though. Our account manager for digital media. I wasn't even aware she raised bees. Welcome to the world of Ryan Boudinot, where a little boy who innocently dresses up as Hitler for Halloween suffers the consequences. ("The Littlest Hitler"); a world where a typical office romance is destroyed by the female half's habit of coming to work covered in live bees ("Bee Beard"); where jacked-up salesmen go on murderous, Burgess-like rampages ("The Sales Team"); and the children of the future are required to kill off their parents--preferably with an ice pick--in order to be accepted to the college of their choice ("Civilization"). You may never want to leave. In each of these fearless, hilarious, and tightly crafted stories, Boudinot's voice rings with a clarity rarely seen in a debut collection. He speaks to a generation that has tried to seem disaffected but can't help wishing for a better world. His characters shake their heads over the same messes they're busily creating, or lash out angrily at a sex-and-violence-saturated culture. But they can never entirely lose their sense of fun, however perverse it may be.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Work like this used to be called "experimental fiction," but the experiments worked out so well that short stories similar to those in The Littlest Hitler are thick on the ground. That said, almost none of them can compare to Boudinot's effortless style. As for content, what is in this man's brain? He is knee-slappin' funny but never corny, witty, ironic, smart as punch, really angry about the world in which we find ourselves, and can write about violence, tenderness, confusion, purpose, and utter mayhem with equal aplomb. Critics are at great pains to compare him to other short story writers, but don't worry about who he is "like." He exhausts the species; he is sui generis.

The title story is about Davy, a middle-schooler whose father lets him go to a Halloween party dressed as Hitler. His classmate Lysette shows up as Anne Frank. Ouch. For most writers, that would be enough; not for Boudinot. The ending will bring you to your knees. Speaking of endings, the snapper at the end of "On Sex and Relationships" comes out of nowhere and is the perfect explanation of all that has gone before. "Newholly" is a chilling tale of a white bread couple living next door to a Somalian woman who beats her children. If they tell, will she be deported? If they don't, will the children be damaged in unforeseeable ways? "Absolut Boudinot" is only a page and a half but packs the wallop of a novel. A major terrorist group strikes on Halloween, dressed as clowns. "We weren't the kinds of terrorists interested in killing lots of people. We sought to destroy property..." The first bomb takes out the Federal Courthouse, a caravan of limos taking teenagers to a formal dance, a convent full of nuns, the Humane Society and a Homeless Shelter. "Oh well, that's one of the costs of doing our part to avenge Big Government and Homosexual Rights." The story ends: "As the sound of emergency vehicles filled our ears, we raised our glasses to toast the destruction of decadent Western civilization and a job well done."

There's no question where Boudinot's sympathies lie, but he is not a preacher. He shows us with tight writing and instantly recognizable characters what he wants us to know. This is one of the best short story collections to come down the pike in a long time. Watch out for Boudinot. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly

Boudinot proves himself a twisted, formidable storyteller in his dark and surefooted debut. In the title story, fourth-grader Davy, with his father's assistance, dresses up as Hitler for Halloween ("I had gotten the idea after watching World War II week on PBS"), but realizes his terrible judgment after an encounter with a classmate dressed as Anne Frank. "On Sex and Relationships" brims with irony as two yuppie couples get together for dinner; the evening is banal enough—board games, nostalgic chitchat—but festering rivalries, buried secrets and bitterness color the evening and threaten to sink the narrator's relationship with his girlfriend. In "Civilization," teens of the future receive "duty papers" when it's time to kill their parents, so as to be accepted into college. Despite his parents' encouragement to kill them ("Don't let your nerves get to you!" reads a Post-it his father sticks to the refrigerator), narrator Craig has his reservations. Reminiscent of early Rick Moody or the short stories of Daniel Handler, each of Boudinot's 13 stories is a microcosm of weirdness imbued with imagination and maniacal wit. (Sept.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1ST edition (September 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582433577
• ISBN-13: 978-1582433578
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #393,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ryan Boudinot is the author of BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE (Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 2012); MISCONCEPTION (Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 2009), a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award; and THE LITTLEST HITLER (Counterpoint, 2006), a Publishers Weekly and Amazon.com Best Book of 2006. His work has appeared in MCSWEENEY'S, THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING, NERVE, BLACK BOOK, and other anthologies and journals. He teaches creative writing at Goddard College's MFA program in Port Townsend, Washington, and blogs about film at therumpus.net. He lives in Seattle.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vastly Entertaining, September 11, 2006

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Littlest Hitler - Stories (Hardcover)

I'd never heard of this guy and almost didn't pick up the book due to its awkward cover, but boy was I glad I did. Boudinot has written some of the most entertaining short fiction I've come across in quite a while. This isn't your pitch-perfect Raymond Carver, John Cheever stuff, nor is it unreadable experimentalist riffing. Rather, this is somewhat skewed, oddball storytelling that gets a little nerdy without ever getting too precious or angsty or anything like that. I guess the closest comparison I would make in tone is to some of music writer Chuck Klosterman's better essays.

About half of the stories occupy a fairly realistic everyday American landscape -- albeit one in which very strange things happen. A good sense of the collection's tone can be found in the title story, in which a 9-year-old boy with a clueless single father is inspired by too much History Channel to dress up as Hitler for Halloween. Maligned by adults and classmates (including the class belle, who is costumed as Anne Frank), he struggles to understand what the fuss about his outfit is since, as he puts it, Hitler was "a really, really mean guy", and therefore, perfectly suitable as a Halloween monster. The story ends with a bang on the last line, as does the following one, "On Sex and Relationships." This story satirizes a pair of wealthy Seattle dot-com yuppie couples whose friendship has drifted a little over the course of a year. Boudinot effortlessly creates a millennial-era"Big Chill" vibe and again ends things with a killer last line. "The Flautist" follows a flute player who works for a factory studio operation and plays a flute owned by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull fame. It starts with a great first line ("I can really bust **** out on a flute.") and goes on to describe an atypical day in his life. Perhaps the strongest story is "So Litttle Time", about a trio of boys who work as field laborers one summer in order to save up money to go to a Dr. Who convention. One of them is trailer-park poor, which leads to some interesting situations and a vivid ending.

Other stories are set in a world very much like our own, but with crucial fabulist twists, many of which involve some seriously dark humor and violence. For example, "Bee Beard", is a pretty straightforward deadpan office farce driven by the conceit that a woman come to work draped with a beard of live bees. The two parts of "Blood Relatives" are Tales From The Crypt-like takes on classic American suburban parents. Without spoiling the surprise and fun, I'll just say that the key word in the title is "blood"... The story "Containment" would be a straightforward portrait of blue-collar workers at a frozen food factory were it not for the fact that one of the workers is a zombie. The premise of "Civilization" is that some teenagers are selected to kill their parents in order to maintain population control, and the story takes us through one such selectee's pregame jitters. "The Sales Team" is, as the first paragraph puts it: "what I'm about to tell you is a carbon copy of [Glengarry Glen Ross], so if you've seen it there's probably not that much new here for you, except that in Glengarry Glen Ross there's no attempted rape."

The stories are about 10-15 pages each, with the exception of "Absolute Boudinot", a page and a half throwaway piece. For the most part, the writing is crisp, readable, and compelling. Which is not to say the book is perfect (very few story collections are top to bottom flawless), three of the stories failed to lead me anywhere satisfying. The protagonist of "Drugs and Toys" is the proud proprietor of a family-owned drug store, and a seeming community fixture. However as the story unfolds, a sense of unease and creepiness starts to seep in, but the story lacks any kind of punchline. "Written by Machines" follows a programmer at a Seattle dot-com who becomes obsessed with an ex-colleague's amazing software code, and just kind of trails off. "Newholly" is a familiar story about a gentrifying dude who's trying to live out his liberal ideals in a mixed-income neighborhood. The conflict comes with his struggle over what to do about his child-beating Somali immigrant neighbor.

Tempting as it might be, this is not a collection to race through greedily. Rather, it's to be savored and rationed, because when it's over, there is no more. The humor ranges from laugh-out-loud to grim, and through the subject matter can be quite outrageous, Boudinot is always firmly in control of every line. This is one I'll be rereading for years to come and I look forward to his next book.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Littlest Surrealism, March 26, 2007

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doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Littlest Hitler - Stories (Hardcover)

Ryan Boudinot has a fairly interesting satirical view of American culture, but his stories just don't go anywhere that's truly enlightening. Much of Boudinot's official promotion states that his works are "surreal," but I'm not so sure that term is being used correctly. Boudinot makes frequent use of surprise twists and (the literary form of) absurdity, but many of these storytelling tricks amount to implausible weirdness rather than thematic insight. One example of actual surrealism found here is "Bee Beard," in which an office worker observes Bring Your Pet to Work Day with a beard of bees, which then leads to funny consequences for the other characters. But most of the stories here feature the less successful use of surrealism, such as "Blood Relatives," in which nuclear families partaking of the typical American meal turn out to be cannibals. Such abrupt twists in Boudinot's stories are merely awkward surprises for the reader, rather than surreal enlightenment. Meanwhile, most of the stories here are quite enjoyable at the start, but except for the truly heartbreaking "So Little Time" (the only fully believable entry in this book), Boudinot just doesn't know how to effectively end a story. Leaving multiple character developments and thematic statements up in the air might be deemed clever by other writers, but readers will find the practice unsatisfying at best. You'll surely get some chuckles out of these stories, and you may even commend Boudinot for his unique outlook. But these stories are mostly vague, inconclusive, and unsuccessful exercises in social commentary. [~doomsdayer520~]

4.0 out of 5 stars A Jew Who Loves The Littlest Hitler, August 22, 2011

By 

Chase Frafer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Littlest Hitler: Stories (Paperback)

Actually, I don't "love" this collection, but I don't love my mother either: I just like her a lot. Boudinot's unique because of his content: it's odd and funny and all his own. The title story stands out--I've read it at least a dozen times over the years and still laugh at the scene--SPOILER--where the narrator, dressed up for Halloween as Hitler, does the Nazi salute when his teacher calls his name for attendance.

Funny, odd, and never pretentious, I would buy this book again if a Neo-Nazi stole it from me on the bus.