Hunger and Other Stories

Hunger and Other Stories
by Ian Randall Wilson

“Wilson pulls at our emotions and hidden desires
with a wide variety of characters.”
—The St. Augustine Record

In his first collection of short stories, Ian Randall Wilson's characters are driven by an intense yearning for satisfaction of the most basic human desires. These are stories of fathers and sons who cannot get along, of impossible family gatherings where no one measures up, of intensely sexual relationships gone bad, of the devastation of drugs. His characters are often haunted by pasts which have set them on uncertain trajectories, driven to actions and outcomes from which they may never recover. Their apprehension of the future is apparent in everything they say and do. Wilson's stories evoke a world measured along realist lines. There is no easy orientation, no one direction that leads to happiness or fulfillment. There is a force at work in the writing, a clarity and directness in the language bound intimately with idea and image. These are serious stories, extraordinary in their depth and range, profoundly moving.

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“From the present-day Bartleby of ‘A Wire Man' to the erotically driven hero of the title story, Ian Randall Wilson's Hunger is filled with questioners and questers. As one of his protagonists says, life is about ‘learning tensions'-tensions that arise more often than not from misconnection and miscommunication. Yet despite their restlessness, the stories glitter with persistent hopes.”
—Robley Wilson, novelist and former editor, North American Review

“Hunger offers not just a world, but worlds, deeply envisioned, deeply felt. These are stories with both body and soul; authoritative, intelligent, unflinching, deft. There is a hint of Malamud here, and Roth, where reality tilts under its own weight and becomes suddenly humorous, suddenly surreal, suddenly painful. But always, always here, metaphor and language have their own story to tell, producing a withering assault on sense, on sound, on sentiment. Hunger is an informed and marvelous first collection of short stories.”
—Chuck Rosenthal, author of My Mistress, Humanity

“Like the feeling of hunger itself, the stories in this collection are full of an activated emptiness and an energetic sense of loss.”
—Jim Krusoe, author of Blood Lake

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