Benjamin Hale: The Fat Artist and Other Stories

This book was written very slowly over the course of the last ten years or so. Some of these stories I began a long time ago, and others are newer. They appear more or less in chronological order. Because this book came together so gradually, I’ve been in a lot of places over the course of writing it, and a lot of people have helped me.

Thanks first to Brian DeFiore and Cary Goldstein for being my team in publishing — whose support and confidence I’ve come to rely upon.

I am gratefully beholden to Bard College, both for the Bard Fiction Prize in 2012 and later for welcoming me back to teach, and to my colleagues there, especially Robert Kelly and Mary Caponegro.

A special thanks is due to Bradford Morrow, a tremendous editor and friend, and Conjunctions , where several of these stories, in slightly different forms, debuted in print. Great thanks is also due to Lorin Stein for publishing one of these stories in The Paris Review .

I want to vociferously thank Lan Samantha Chang, Connie Brothers, and everyone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Thanks also to Tobias Wolff, who helped me fix a broken part of one of these stories. Thanks to Brian Morton and Sarah Lawrence College. Thanks to T. Geronimo Johnson, and everyone at UC Berkeley’s SCWP (it was great while it lasted).

I am grateful to Kathryn Hamilton and her theater company, Sister Sylvester, with whom I spent a very weird couple of weeks in Detroit in 2013, out of which one of these stories emerged, and I am particularly indebted to Terence Mintern.

Thank you, Micaela Morrissette, for staples, tape, pens, countless other favors, and general help with just about everything.

Thanks also to the following people, each for their own different and important reasons: Jonathan Ames, Matt Beckemeyer, Christopher Beha, Caroline Bermudez, Ethan Canin, Edward Carey, Eleanor Catton, Sam Cooper, Moira Donegan, Jennifer DuBois, Cara Ellis, Julia Fierro, Gwenda-lin Grewal, Kevin Holden, William Melvin Kelley, Alexandra Kleeman, Chris Leslie-Hynan, James Han Mattson, JW McCormick, Eric Morgan, Sara Ortiz, Andres Restrepo, Karen Russell, Kate Sachs, Maggie Shipstead, Bennett Sims, Alexander Singh, Ted Thompson, Sergei Tsimberov, Graham Webster, Chris Wiley, and Jenny Zhang.

Endless love and thanks to my parents and my brothers.

And thank you, Caitlin Millard. You know what for.

© PETE MAUNEY

BENJAMIN HALE is also the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore . His fiction and nonfiction have appeared, among other places, in Conjunctions, Harper’s , the New York Times , the Washington Post , and Dissent , and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing . Originally from Colorado, he is a senior editor of Conjunctions , currently teaches at Bard College, and lives in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley.

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