If David Sedaris and John Grisham collaborated on the comic memoir of a kid’s first job, and Quentin Tarantino rewrote it as a noir masterwork, then “Fat Boy” would be that memoir. This short memoir retells the surreal insanity of Dayne Sherman’s life at fifteen years of age, showing the jaggedness of living on the margins of society in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, death all around. The boy, now an author, was shaped by the experiences of working on the roadsides along with local ruffians. There is no quarter asked or given on these dusty byways, and no one will ever be the same traveling alone or together.
"Fat Boy" was first published in the Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies at Arkansas State University.
Endorsements of Dayne Sherman and his work:
“Dayne Sherman writes like I wish I could if I was still young enough to change.”
--Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin’ & Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story
“Dayne Sherman’s exciting fiction takes us down a dusty Southern road to a place where both honor and ties of blood are more important than breath itself, and where even the religion is violent.”
--Tim Gautreaux, author of The Missing & The Clearing
“Sherman’s promising debut chronicles a young man’s thorny return to his Louisiana hometown… Sherman brilliantly reunites a land with its own set of vicious rules with a native of that land who, as a changed man, simply wants peace. Weaving his way through a series of complex characters and a terrain fertilized with a proud but bloody history, Sherman tells a spirited and engaging tale.”
--Publishers Weekly
"Fat Boy" was first published in the Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies at Arkansas State University.
Endorsements of Dayne Sherman and his work:
“Dayne Sherman writes like I wish I could if I was still young enough to change.”
--Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin’ & Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story
“Dayne Sherman’s exciting fiction takes us down a dusty Southern road to a place where both honor and ties of blood are more important than breath itself, and where even the religion is violent.”
--Tim Gautreaux, author of The Missing & The Clearing
“Sherman’s promising debut chronicles a young man’s thorny return to his Louisiana hometown… Sherman brilliantly reunites a land with its own set of vicious rules with a native of that land who, as a changed man, simply wants peace. Weaving his way through a series of complex characters and a terrain fertilized with a proud but bloody history, Sherman tells a spirited and engaging tale.”
--Publishers Weekly
