Rabbit Punches - by Jason Ockert (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 13 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.

Review Quotes

"Ockert's debut features 13 stories, a host of quirky characters and strange plots grounded in a reality that is as disturbing as it is whimsical. In one story, a young boy feeds ticks into a sleeping child's ear while a man prepares to arm wrestle Jesus. Though Ockert's voice is still developing, his beautiful and unexpected imagery make him a writer to be watched." -Publishers Weekly

"If you are interested only in conventional, time-proven storytelling, then Rabbit Punches is not for you. But if you like literary surprises, pleasantly weird characters, and plots that stand on their heads and even cartwheel, then check out this short story collection. One word to describe it? Kafkaesque." -The Bloomsbury Review

"Reading Jason Ockert's debut collection, Rabbit Punches (Low Fidelity), is like getting lost on a road trip: you start off fine, following your map, but still somehow wind up in a place you never saw coming. Populated with earnest characters in mainly small-town and southern settings (Ockert was born in Indiana and raised in Florida), the 13 stories are quirky and unsettling, full of unexpected turns." -Chicago Reader (Critic's Choice)

"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