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SEX AND DEATH
“With artful guilelessness and an ability to never look away from the world’s miseries and ecstasies, Tanzer has done it again: populated his fictions with people and places and situations so vivid that the pages shimmer and pulse with vitality and purpose.”
—Tom Williams, author of Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales
“In Sex and Death, Ben Tanzer deftly illustrates the struggle between fidelity and desire in a uniquely sympathetic manner. His stories display an honest exploration of the governance of our sexual thoughts and deeds, as determined by natural urges and behaviors modeled to us in childhood.”
—Lauren Becker, author of If I Would Leave Myself Behind
—Tom Williams, author of Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales
“In Sex and Death, Ben Tanzer deftly illustrates the struggle between fidelity and desire in a uniquely sympathetic manner. His stories display an honest exploration of the governance of our sexual thoughts and deeds, as determined by natural urges and behaviors modeled to us in childhood.”
—Lauren Becker, author of If I Would Leave Myself Behind
- GenresShort Stories
72 pages, Paperback
Published January 12, 2016
207 people want to read
About the author
Ben Tanzer
40 books267 followersEmmy-award winner Ben Tanzer's acclaimed work includes the short story collection UPSTATE, the science fiction novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space and Be Cool. His recent novel The Missing was released in March 2024 by 7.13 Books and was a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year finalist in the category of Traditional Fiction and his new book After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema, which Kirkus Reviews calls "A heartfelt if overstuffed tribute to the author’s father and the ameliorative power of art," was released by Ig Publishing in May 2025. Ben is also the host of the long running podcast This Podcast Will Change Your Life and lives in Chicago with his family.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 31, 2016
Another great book from Ben Tanzer, this one a micro-dose you can plow through in a heartbeat. Every story in here is excellent but "Dead or Alive" is a small masterpiece about teenage boys living for pussy and the consequences of getting what you want. It's funny and sad and heartbreaking. Ben Tanzer is like Henry Miller, filled with those innate desires, but alive in a century where even the most passionate of lovers can talk down his dedication to lust and self-renewal until he feels almost dead. Prepare to laugh and be embarrassed by your own laughter. It'll probably hurt a lot.
January 20, 2016
To date, Tanzer's best story collection.
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July 20, 2020It changed my life.
March 6, 2016
Tanzer hits an amazing sweet spot in these stories, that exact point of the greatest uncertainty in a character's mind, that pivot between what they're driven to do, their fears, and who they can be and still manage to sleep at night. It's brutal in a way, how raw the place is that the characters are visited in, but there's a compassion to it as well, most of the judgment of the character's failings seeming to be their own. It's some good stuff, quick but hitting sharp and deep.
February 5, 2016
These little stories feel like journal entries in the best way. They're sexy and funny and awkward and sweet and weird. I'll read anything Ben writes. It's a pretty little book. Ben Tanzer is the nazz.
July 13, 2016
In Tanzer's delicious gulp of a read, Sex and Death, the word that most ties these airtight stories together is "desire." Each little capsule floats on the ebb and flow that exists between memory and dream, in the same conversational, sometimes even anxious voice that is a staple of the author's work. There are, as usual, assorted pop culture threads woven into the cloth of these economical scenes between men and women, boys and girls, fathers and sons and mothers and daughters...highlighting both what is there, and more subtly what is not. There's a quiet, wise sophistication in these stories...an understanding, almost even forgiveness, of all the humans at their middle...and we could all be so lucky to consider such things as Sex and Death so deeply!
Sunnyoutside has once again crafted a back-pocket gem, done in a sitting or two, and what else is there to say about the cover but wow! Further proof that the small press is where the lifeblood and the fire of publishing truly live.
Sunnyoutside has once again crafted a back-pocket gem, done in a sitting or two, and what else is there to say about the cover but wow! Further proof that the small press is where the lifeblood and the fire of publishing truly live.
March 4, 2016
A brilliant collection of short stories about motives, morals, and self-doubt.
March 22, 2016
I have written a review of this book that will appear in the coming months in the online journal Heavy Feather Review.
April 8, 2016
A very good book, for what it is: it's somewhere between a chapbook and a full collection of stories, and it hits that balance perfectly.
For my money, I think Tanzer's best stories are still in his New York collections. Those stories are rich and more fully developed. But "Sex and Death," while shorter and more sparing, somehow still feels as patient as those longer stories, and somehow--in the very best stories of the collection--still captures that same sense of humanity that just pulsed within the New York collections. There are stories here written with such empathy and understanding that you truly get the feeling that Tanzer loves the people he's writing about, flaws and all.
Here, too, the author is a little older than he was with those earlier story collections, and so the perspective has shifted a bit. In the New York Stories, it was a thirty-something man who was just entering the world of family-hood, just leaving behind the roaring twenties. With "Sex and Death," the characters have settled into late thirties/ early forties, and while it's not "mid-life crisis" material, there's definitely a sense of discontent sneaking up on many of these characters, a sense--not unlike some of the great Russo novels of small-town New York--of the good times being long past, and maybe a desire (however ill-fated) to try to tap back into them.
It's a nice book to read on a plane, too, if not for the bizarrely suggestive cover that you can just tell people is supposed to be taken literally ("Mind out of the gutter! It's just ice cream."), then for the old ladies who'll look over your shoulder to read and then turn away, embarrassed when the words come into focus...
For my money, I think Tanzer's best stories are still in his New York collections. Those stories are rich and more fully developed. But "Sex and Death," while shorter and more sparing, somehow still feels as patient as those longer stories, and somehow--in the very best stories of the collection--still captures that same sense of humanity that just pulsed within the New York collections. There are stories here written with such empathy and understanding that you truly get the feeling that Tanzer loves the people he's writing about, flaws and all.
Here, too, the author is a little older than he was with those earlier story collections, and so the perspective has shifted a bit. In the New York Stories, it was a thirty-something man who was just entering the world of family-hood, just leaving behind the roaring twenties. With "Sex and Death," the characters have settled into late thirties/ early forties, and while it's not "mid-life crisis" material, there's definitely a sense of discontent sneaking up on many of these characters, a sense--not unlike some of the great Russo novels of small-town New York--of the good times being long past, and maybe a desire (however ill-fated) to try to tap back into them.
It's a nice book to read on a plane, too, if not for the bizarrely suggestive cover that you can just tell people is supposed to be taken literally ("Mind out of the gutter! It's just ice cream."), then for the old ladies who'll look over your shoulder to read and then turn away, embarrassed when the words come into focus...
April 11, 2016
I had the great fortune to hear Tanzer read from this slim volume of stories at Hot Pillow during AWP#16 in Los Angeles. And though this book appears slight, the stories are exactly the opposite. So full of life the words spill over from the page, with voracity, intensity, desires, lust. These characters are vivid, and struggling with many of the same concerns we all do: how to live fully, the opposite of shut down, and authentically, within ourselves. Tanzer tows the lines between passion and fidelity, but with empathy and compassion. I also enjoyed his seemingly effortless technique of slipping between second and first person points-of-view, almost like slipping between a spouse and a lover. So much to speculate in these complex stories, wholly miniaturized gems.
March 22, 2016
To sum up, this little book says get all the sex you can and then die. Is about men for men. Seems they are all little boys who never become real men. Having two husbands [ on 2nd one] have seen them in this little book and wonder why?
April 11, 2016
These stories are delicious little cocktails of teenage angst mixed with mid-life ennui, shaken till frothy and served in a martini glass over two bright-red cherries that have been soaked in Bacardi 151 Rum.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews