The Poor Man's Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide: Stories

Twelve stories, fraught with an unapologetic voice of firsthand experience, that pry the lock off of the addiction, fanaticism, violence, and fear of characters whose lives are mired in the darkness of isolation and the horror and the hilarity of the mundane. This is the Deep South: the dark territory of brine, pine, gravel, and red clay, where pavement still fears to tread.

Contains interior illustrations by Ryan Murray and Patrick Traylor.

"Schuler Benson writes like the spawn of Chuck Palahniuk and Barry Hannah. While approaching his subjects with empathy, humor, and a keen eye for detail, he creates a world of snake-charming preachers, meth heads, and spurned lovers. This collection will make you laugh, make you anxious, and keep you turning the pages. Read this damn book."
-Kody Ford, The Idle Class Magazine

"A Breece D'J Pancake of the plains, Benson writes with a hell of a knack for dialect. His characters are dirty, flawed, and all-too familiar. There are no heroes here. Yet in these stories, Benson manages to lift his people to another plane; someplace where they might achieve a little redemption."
-Eric Shonkwiler, author of Above All Men

"Schuler Benson has a playwright's ear for dialogue, a poet's eye for scene, and a comic's sense for when the sane is actually crazy, the crazy actually sane. The Poor Man's Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide announces Benson's place in the tradition of Wells Tower, Barry Hannah, and Mark Twain: here comes another great documentarian of the agonized and hilarious souls who inhabit Rural America."
-Brian Ted Jones, Electric Literature

Find out more about Alternating Current Press at http: //www.press.alternatingcurrentarts.com.

Author: Ryan Murray
Publisher: Alternating Current
Published: 07/26/2014
Pages: 148
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.37lbs
Size: 7.99h x 5.00w x 0.34d
ISBN: 9780692251195

About the Author
Schuler Benson's fiction and poetry have appeared in Kudzu Review, Hobart, The Idle Class, and elsewhere, and he has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. He completed his undergraduate studies at University of Arkansas and is currently enrolled in the MA program at Coastal Carolina University. The Poor Man's Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide (Alternating Current, 2014) is his first book. You can find him on Twitter at @schulerbenson.


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