Big Lonesome: Stories

Jim Ruland is an incredible writer; his short fiction not only entertains, but provides a blueprint for how short stories really should be written. The problem is, I found it nearly impossible to dissect them and analyze them, because he trapped me; I couldn't step away to take the long view. Each of these 13 tales is compact, unique, surprising. For instance, The Previous Adventures of Popeye the Sailor is a droll take on a pop-culture icon; Red Cap also springs from literary pop--Little Red Riding Hood--but twists the heart and leaves a chill in the stomach. And A Terrible Thing in a Place Like This should be declared a classic for its elegance, visceral impact and masterful, harrowing blend of reality and dreaminess. Wonderful stuff; well worth reading. Susan O'Neill, author: Don't Mean Nothing: Short stories of Viet Nam

Jim Ruland arises from L.A. like a new John Fante for the post-McSweeney's generation. The diverse stories here are whip-smart, weird, and Imaginative with a capital I. One bad-ass debut collection, Big Lonesome will be beating up and taking the lunch money of lesser collections for years to come. Ruland's genre-twisting genius returns us to the days when reading short stories was fun---Remember? In a book full of innovative characters and circumstances, one highlight is the brilliant title story, a Pynchon-meets-Old-West tale like none you've read before, where even a robot Indian can find love and a mad scientist can try his hand at bounty hunting. I don't know about lonesome, but this collection is big fun.

I enjoyed Big Lonesome, Jim Ruland's debut collection of short stories, immensely. His writing is clean and spare and original; his stories funny and unsettling. Among the faves: Kessler Has No Lucky Pants, a bittersweet comic tale told in interview format; the touching Night Soul Man, one of several of Ruland's stories featuring the charged interplay between man and nature; and Brains for Bengo, the most disturbing story in the bunch. To me, Ruland's writing evokes a distinctly American landscape of love and death, good luck and bad, metal and muscle, the ugly, the wild, the old and the young. He takes contemporary fiction readers out of their comfort zones, but he does it in a generous, human, seemingly effortless way, and delivers on the rewards.

There are no disappointments in this collection; each story offers something different while displaying a mastery of language and an empathetic understanding of what makes us human. Jim Ruland is a remarkable writer who has produced a debut collection that cannot be ignored. He's not afraid to challenge our assumptions, and in doing so we get to look at the world from a slightly off-kilter angle. [The full review first appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.]

Ruland knows how to tell a story, that's obvious from the first few pages of this gripping collection of shorts. There's a cleverness in his conceits here, the way he reimagines cartoon and fairy tale characters into new and sometimes seemingly outlandish situations. But he's talented enough to never falter. Beneath the slick veneer there's a troubled, wildly beating heart. It's an often lonely, bruised or despondent heart, and it's that juxtaposition that makes this collection so riveting and striking and moves it well beyond clever pulp and thrusts it into literary originality. He doesn't shy away from unsavory characters -- sometimes they creep up on you, and sometimes they hit you full in the face -- but one of his greatest feats is how manages to twist and change our initial impressions. Whether it's through a re-imagined modern-day Dick Tracy, a pair of (nonexistent)lucky pants, or a hitman named Big Elbow Macaroni, Ruland keeps you turning the pages and keeps you tangled up in the characters. An excellent debut.