Rabbit Punches by Jason Ockert
A re-release of the iconic first collection by celebrated author Jason Ockert.
Riotously funny, beautifully written, and charged with emotional intelligence, this well-crafted debut investigates the world from the fringe through characters who stray so far from convention they seem to inhabit another universe. Whether it’s Alston Goldstein ferrying drugs around Florida on his yellow moped, a young man fighting his entire neighborhood to find a suitable husband for his pregnant sister, or a man preparing to arm wrestle Jesus, these thirteen stories hinge on the interplay between middle-class normality and capricious heroes, transporting readers to a tenderly evoked world where the real and the absurd at last make peace.
Publication Date: Nov 16, 2021
Paperback: 188 pages
ISBN: 9781950539413
Also available as an eBook
A re-release of the iconic first collection by celebrated author Jason Ockert.
Riotously funny, beautifully written, and charged with emotional intelligence, this well-crafted debut investigates the world from the fringe through characters who stray so far from convention they seem to inhabit another universe. Whether it’s Alston Goldstein ferrying drugs around Florida on his yellow moped, a young man fighting his entire neighborhood to find a suitable husband for his pregnant sister, or a man preparing to arm wrestle Jesus, these thirteen stories hinge on the interplay between middle-class normality and capricious heroes, transporting readers to a tenderly evoked world where the real and the absurd at last make peace.
Publication Date: Nov 16, 2021
Paperback: 188 pages
ISBN: 9781950539413
Also available as an eBook
A re-release of the iconic first collection by celebrated author Jason Ockert.
Riotously funny, beautifully written, and charged with emotional intelligence, this well-crafted debut investigates the world from the fringe through characters who stray so far from convention they seem to inhabit another universe. Whether it’s Alston Goldstein ferrying drugs around Florida on his yellow moped, a young man fighting his entire neighborhood to find a suitable husband for his pregnant sister, or a man preparing to arm wrestle Jesus, these thirteen stories hinge on the interplay between middle-class normality and capricious heroes, transporting readers to a tenderly evoked world where the real and the absurd at last make peace.
Publication Date: Nov 16, 2021
Paperback: 188 pages
ISBN: 9781950539413
Also available as an eBook
PRAISE FOR RABBIT PUNCHES
"Rabbit Punches marks the debut of an exciting new American talent. Ockert’s voice is quirky, funny, and totally original—it conveys, in these dreamlike, virtuosic stories, a strange and vulnerable kindness you haven’t read before.”
—George Saunders
"The writing is hip but not terminally hip, fun, at times very fun, and contains signs that the author is disturbed enough to be worth watching. He may tell us some new things."
—Padgett Powell
"The characters in Rabbit Punches go through life a bit dazed but it doesn’t slow them down any, as they deliver pharmaceuticals, sell Bibles, rescue elephants, rough up suitors, fall in unrequitable love, and make, in general, outrageous heroic gestures—all the more heroic from the hands of the ill-equipped. It certainly doesn’t keep them from charming us. Ockert forges a comic dialectic of alienation and integration in this quirky southern universe.”
—Mary Caponegro
"A literary zoo filled with landscapers and lexicographers, pirates and proselytizers, lovers, losers, and an exterminator—just American weirdos doing the thankless job of living. Crack scribbler Jason Ockert hits the ground running with this mordant knee-slapper."
—J. Robert Lennon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jason Ockert is the author of Wasp Box, a novel, and three collections of short stories: Shadowselves, Neighbors of Nothing, and Rabbit Punches. Winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, the Atlantic Monthly Fiction Contest, and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, he was also a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Million Writers Award. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best American Mystery Stories, Granta, The Cincinnati Review, Oxford American, One Story, and McSweeney’s. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University.
