Fat Time and Other Stories

by Jeffery Renard Allen, Diontae Black (Narrator)

FAT TIME is the powerful new collection from PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Jeffery Renard Allen. Encompassing ten short stories, the collection is loosely linked around African notions of time and place, along with African views of space, cosmology, and metaphysics. The stories are set in invented locations in both Africa and America and play out over a continuum of time.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

9 pages, Audible Audio

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Jeffery Renard Allen is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and of the widely celebrated and influential novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His other awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-first Century Award, a Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, a support grant from Creative Capital, and the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review. He has been a fellow at The Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, African Voices, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and Homeground: Language for an American Landscape.

Born in Chicago, Renard Allen holds a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Besides teaching at Queens College (including, as of fall 2007, in the college’s new MFA program in creative writing), Allen is also an instructor in the graduate writing program at New School University. He has also taught for Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya, and in the writing program at Columbia University. In addition, he is the director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana, to be held in the summer of 2008. A resident of Far Rockaway, Queens, Allen is presently at work on the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom.

Reviews

[Janalyn, the blind reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

If no one has said it yet let me be the first Jeffrey Rennerd Allen is a word Smith his writing style is to die for while reading the stories I couldn’t wait to see what he wrote next not only because the stories were interesting but the way he words himself is phenomenal the first story is a man who goes on a mission he believes from God Black people want to kill his kind and I don’t know if there albinos or people who produce light I wasn’t certain but that didn’t stop me from loving this story and they just get better from there from a daughter who loses her mom to cancer to a boy who sees classmates die in strange ways the stories are weird and strange but OMG good their stories about ghost death there’s women protagonist men and children tell stories from seemingly every point of view. I just want to reiterate reading this book is an adventure in words Mr. Allen is a gymnast when it comes to the written language and his writing is beautiful thought-provoking strange out-of-the-box and beautiful. I didn’t know what to expect when I started this book but OMG I loved it it’s horror/literary fiction/thrillers/paranormal if you love the written language you will be doing yourself a favor to get familiar with Jeffrey Rennard Allen’s Book Fat Times And Other Stories I am definitely going to be looking for his books in the future and will read anything he’s published already I have never been this over the moon about someone and their word structure but you have to read it to understand he truly is a genius when it comes to the written word in these stories or definite examples of that a truly great five star read it is a short story collection that if it hasn’t should’ve won awards I absolutely loved it! I received this book from NetGalley and gray wolf press but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Gurldoggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imaginative stories of love, violence and perseverance in contemporary Black lives. Many of the stories make use of fantastic elements, fictionalized versions of famous figures or subtly warped visions of the near future, to great effect. The best of the stories are inspired, reaching profound emotional depths. A handful are inscrutable. All of them are haunting and evocative told with wonderfully rich language.

[Tim Pacius]

It’s always tough to write about short stories collections because they’re very frequently uneven.

I enjoyed the stories inspired by historical figures the most here. Particularly the John Johnson and Miles Davis stories. As for the other stories, the tale about the on the low friends was probably the non historically inspired story I enjoyed the most here.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allen works best for me at novel length--Rails Upon My Back is classic. But there's plenty here to command attention, especially "Four Girls," and "Heads," which takes Jimi Hendrix to places that you have to believe he would have appreciated.