The Taste of Penny agitates the senses in thirteen stories modern and mischievous.
“Ten dark, suspenseful, and tightly wound stories teeter on the edge of catastrophe and the surreal piecing-back-together of life afterwards. Parker (Ovenman) tosses his characters into some form of peril, whether physical—like the narrator of “Our Cause,” who loses the tip of his tongue—or emotional, like the jingoistic American in “The Boy and the Colgante,” who erects a giant illuminated American flag in front of his house in the heart of “French redneck” Quebec. Parker's characters are disfigured or pitiable—one weathers guilt and emotional torture while paralyzed in a wheelchair, one gnaws at his fingers and attempts to excrete a swallowed penny, one stands in line outside the house where his ex-girlfriend is interviewing potential new boyfriends. Parker's prose is concise and quirky, packed with unexpected turns (“It's like yak butter or meat jelly,” says one character. “You don't know exactly what it is but you know it's there”), and aside from the few moments when Parker gets too clever for his own good (as with the unnecessarily obscure “The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady”), these stories are haunting and constantly surprising.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This collection is the perfect way to escape and live a life (or lives) a little more dangerous and adventurous for awhile.”
—The Orange Spotlight
“Whether moose legs or tongue tips or sperm counts or pennies lodged into a throat, Parker disassembles us so compellingly that we no longer wish to be whole. His inventiveness revises the world as we know it with audacious wit.”
—Mary Caponegro, author of All Fall Down and The Star Cafe
“Here we have characters in Russia messing up in hilarious ways; taking care of a cheating girlfriend’s pet bird; failing miserably at roadside tests in front of cops; spraying indoor centipedes with cheap cologne. Has my life ever been this bad? Nope. And that’s good. Have I ever felt like such a foreigner in an already-strange land? Not even close. Do I wish that I’d written these stories? Absolutely. I’m jealous. The Taste of Penny’s the best ride at a spectacular carnival.” —George Singleton, author of The Half-Mammals of Dixie and These People Are Us
“Jeff Parker’s stories are mysterious, heartfelt, and utterly captivating.
In The Taste Of Penny, he casually flexes a Voltron-like
combo of writerly gifts: Ron Carlson’s mastery of voice, Elmore
Leonard’s uncanny ear for dialogue, and Raymond Carver’s
spare wit. This collection contains some of the most absorbing
and brightly imaginative stories I’ve come across in some time.”
—Davy Rothbart, FOUND Magazine and This American Life
“Jeff Parker is a writer who understands
that voice is the doorway
to all true beauty in fiction. Tight,
wry, dark, and deeply funny—he
is a master of the hyper-compressed
sentence that explodes with more
meaning and nuance than should
be possible.”
—George Saunders, author of Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation
Jeff Parker is the author of the story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc) and the novel Ovenman (Tin House). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Walrus, and others. He co-edited Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House) and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto.
Photo by Miriam Berkley
