Reviews

What Are You Looking At?: The First Fat Fiction Anthology by Wesley McNair, Donna Jarrell, S.L. Wisenberg, Monica Wood, Sharon Solwitz, Frederick Busch, Denise Duhamel, Patricia Goedicke, Jill McCorkle, Cathy Smith-Bowers, Rebecca Curtis, Conrad Hilberry, J.L. Haddaway, Katherine Riegel, Erin McGraw, Terrence Hayest, Dorothy Allison, Raymond Carver, Rawdon Tomlinson, Tobias Wolff, Rhoda B. Stamell, Andre Dubus, George Saunders, Pam Houston, Stephen Dunn, Allison Joseph, Junot Díaz, Ira Sukrungruang, Peter Carey, Jack Coulehan, Vern Rutsala

mrswythe89's review against another edition

2.0

I thought it was OK, I guess? A lot of it was about food ... I dunno, I guess I kinda disapproved of how so many of them were about food, because you're not always fat just because you eat a lot. Lots of fat people eat like anyone else does! The stories felt v. American, but perhaps that was only to be expected, since the editors are American.

The stories I liked best were the ones by Peter Carey (creepy story about a fat men's conspiracy that turns out to be about an experiment on fat men in an intensely fatphobic society) and Raymond Carver (perplexing, slightly sci-fi-ish one about a fat guy who eats a lot at a diner and refers to himself as "we" and the waitress who serves him, who is perhaps going to undergo a mysterious change after the end of the story). A lot of the others were that sort of horrible modern story that have no real ending and aren't really about anything but the unpleasantness of their characters' lives/the characters themselves.

melanie_page's review

4.0

The stories in this collection were really great. When I read the title of the anthology, my first thought was the Raymond Carver story "Fat," and it was in there. BUT! I kept wondering...is this all there is out there in terms of "fat-fiction"? No one else writes any? Makes me want to write more of it...also makes me wonder if people don't really want to read it and that is why I can't get any published. Also, I'm really surprised that most of the reviews of this book comment that the reader expected this to be an uplifting anthology. It can be really difficult to turn a physical/psychological problem into something feel-good. I wasn't expecting that at all.