Love Without: Stories [Paperback]

Jerry Stahl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2007

From the bestselling author of the memoir Permanent Midnight and the novel I, Fatty comes a long-awaited collection of short stories. Jerry’s Stahl’s perverse, yet often touching tales, many of which first appeared in publications ranging from Playboy to the Pushcart Prize to Best Erotic Fiction, plumb the depths of eccentric romance, sex-starved adolescence, mid-life crisis, and family dysfunction. From a teenager’s tryst with a recently widowed middle-aged woman on an airplane, to a dissatisfied dentist’s attempt to find freedom on the road with a much younger woman, all the way to an intensely erotic love affair between an ex-junkie and an ex-circus midget with a sexual obsession with vegetables, this collection never fails to arouse and surprise. With a disarmingly immediate prose style, Stahl finds great eroticism, humor, and humanity in the wildest of encounters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Stahl's 1995 memoir, Permanent Midnight (detailing his life as a drug-addicted TV writer), and three novels (I, Fatty the most recent), have won him a fan base that shares his glee for the comically deviant, but even his most ardent supporters will be disappointed with this hodgepodge of thin sketches and riffs. Several pieces trade in little more than shock value. Bunker Buster, for instance, details a homosexual tryst with Dick Cheney in the backroom of a Wyoming gun shop. Readers will also meet a hirsute midget with a vegetable fetish, a religiously devout hooker whose creative interpretation of her virginity pledge allows her to work as a prostitute, and a woman who takes her cocaine in an unorthodox manner. These characteristically perverse entries are incongruously offset with more conventional but promising fare: an account of a straitlaced dentist spontaneously running off with a teenaged girl hints at a desire to go beyond the merely eccentric, while the handful of pieces about boyhood are deeply felt, if too slight to satisfy. The book is less a collection of fully conceived stories than a repository for half-baked ideas. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"A wordsmith extraordinaire." -- New Angeles Monthly

"Tender and gut-busting." -- LA Weekly

"[Stahl's] flair for the tragicomic is well-suited to the short form.... He metes out desperation and dark humor in just the right amounts, applying clarity and sympathy to subjects many would consider marginal or disturbing. It's obvious that he relates to his characters, weirdos though they may be; it's obvious, too, that he thinks the reader, with a little help, could relate to them as well." -- Washington City Paper

"[Stahl]...knows how to shock us into laughter, and his best work mines the grotesque for pathos, a tradition that includes Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson ...The key isn't whom he writes about, but at what depth...Stahl plunges us into depraved worlds with a keen intensity of purpose, and his addled protagonists run up hard against the truth of their desires." -- Los Angeles Times

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Open City Books; 1st edition (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890447455
• ISBN-13: 978-1890447458
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,131,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Outrageous!, September 30, 2007

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Love Without: Stories (Paperback)

Jerry Stahl is a unique writer, one that will shock your socks off, make you feel as though you should put brown paper over the cover of the book so that no one will know you're reading it, and definitely reserve participating in his stories in secret private places. BUT, the man can write short stories more original in content and craftsmanship than most anyone around. This collection of eleven stories covers a large span of his career and when grouped together in the manner in which his publisher has placed them, they shock, entertain, tickle, horrify, and in general provide come of the strangest exploration of human borderline behavior ever written!

Meet Miss Chatty Cheeks, a woman of advanced years who abuses cocaine through an 'original' portal; Doris (an older woman) and early teen virgin Bob and the physical encounter they share in their assigned seats while flying across America; Puray, a chubby blond small person (AKA midget) who has a flair for using braised carrots in a most bizarre fashion; Lorraine and Mr. Carrigan who share an apartment wall with surprises; Vice President Dick Cheney in a sadomasochistic encounter with a fellow gun aficianado in the back room of a guns and ammo shop; and a religiously challenged prostitute convinced her services are acts of charity.

Some would call these stories smarmy at best, but that would be ignoring the superb writing of this fine author. He knows what he is about, loves to tantalize the reader with tales that border on hallucinations, and yet he rounds up these stories with such skill and craftsmanship that they hold the readers blushing attention. He may not be the first author to enter the realm of the bawdy, but he is the equal of many of the greats who have lasted through time with their naughty little tales. He is outrageous AND he is gifted! Grady Harp, September 07

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Quick Read, I enjoyed it, September 7, 2007

By 

Jocelyn Bocking (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love Without: Stories (Paperback)

This is the first book I have read By Jerry Stahl, and I enjoyed it. It was a quick read, and good for someone like me who has a short attention span. I love Bizarre Americana, and these short stories really highlight the hidden Middle Class skeletons in closets. I do want to read his other titles now, I like Stahl's style.

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible, September 16, 2011

By 

East Cobber - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Love Without: Stories (Paperback)

Do not waste your time attempting to read this book. It's a series of short stories. I could only read two from beginning to end. The rest of the stories were so uninteresting that you couldn't continue reading them. Boring, boring!