The Hungry Girls and Other Stories - by Patricia Eakins (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Expanded 30th-anniversary edition of Patricia Eakins's critically acclaimed collection of short stories, "a modern bestiary which reworks the stuff of mythologies, spanning the cultures of the planet."

In addition to the 13 short fictions collected in the original 1989 edition of this book, this new edition includes the story "Black Food," never before published in the United States.

This edition also includes the transcript of Françoise Palleau-Papin's 1998 interview with the author, "A Conversation with Patricia Eakins," as well as "Here Be Dragons," John Richards's new interview with Jeffrey Miller of Cadmus Editions, the original publisher of The Hungry Girls. Additionally, there are two short pieces about the 1997 Collision Theory theatrical production of The Hungry Girls: A Fairy Tale from Stephanie Gilman (co-producer and director) and Kristin Tanzer (co-producer and choreographer), and a piece from artist Moira Bateman about her Hungry Girls nightdresses, mixed media fiber sculptures inspired by Eakins's story.

The cover features the brilliant work of renowned artist Brenda Goodman ("Self Portrait 13," 48x40, oil on wood, 1994).

Review Quotes

"Patricia Eakins's territory is in that tangled thicket of the imagination somewhere between Borges and Burroughs, between the fairy tales of Grimm and the magic realism of the South Americans, a kind of Invisible Cities as animal sanctuary ... It is a work of imaginative brilliance, a considerable achievement in modest disguise. ... Readers interested in the pleasure of surprising fictions will go out of their way to find Patricia Eakins's triumphantly quirky first book."
-- Jonathan Baumbach, The New York Times Book Review

"The Hungry Girls is a continuously startling work, an elegant violation of the rules of contemporary fiction."
-- Elizabeth Herron

"A stunning mixture of mythology, surrealism, anthropology and nature, the thirteen stories in this collection are a tour-de-force of originality, imagination and style. ... The Hungry Girls is quite simply one of the most intriguing and entertaining new collections of short fiction I have read in recent years."
-- Greg Boyd, Asylum

"These stories are more than imagination; they are witty, playful, soberly detailed glimpses into realities totally believable."
-- Faye Kicknosway

"Patricia Eakins's The Hungry Girls is as rare a creature as those that populate its pages, a genuinely original, beautiful, and disturbing work of art. It is a kind of imaginative bestiary for our times, but a bestiary in the same sense that Borges's Ficciones is a collection of myths or that Calvino's Cosmicomics is a scientific treatise. And it shares with these works a lightness of touch, comic wit, and astonishing inventiveness."
-- Robert Coover