In his extraordinary debut collection, Pure Slaughter Value, Robert Bingham tracks the conscience of a generation that grew up educated, privileged, and starved for meaning. Bingham’s strange sense of morbid fancy collides with a gutsy realism; the result is splendid a young man is seduced by his first cousin (or maybe it’s the other way around) at her brother’s wake ( and “The Other Family and “); a bored couple plot to kill a man during their ski-resort honeymoon ( and “Marriage Is Murder and “); a yuppie banker risks his whole perfect life for an affair with a junkie ( and “The Fixers and “); an insurance-company bounty hunter tracks down walk-aways from drug and alcohol rehab ( and “Preexisting Condition and “); and in the title story, an eleven-year-old boy is caught at the exquisitely uneasy intersection of the safety of childhood play and the pain of grown-up love and longing.These lean, potent stories are utterly original, and yet by turns recall Salinger, in their intellectual acuity, emotional depth, and wicked, dark humor; Fitzgerald, in their vivid chronicling of a new, restless social elite; and the work of and “transgressive and ” writers, in their pervasive sense of the imminent possibility of danger and violence, even in the most civilized surroundings. Above all, the stories in Pure Slaughter Value mark the debut of a striking new literary voice–unsparing, bold, ironic, and true–that will haunt us for a long time to come.

Pure Slaughter Value: Stories PDF

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