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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.
