Ryan Ridge lives in Long Beach, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Mississippi Review, Fractured West, Salt Hill, The Los Angeles Review, Juked, and PANK, among others. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
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Hunters & Gamblers
By Ryan Ridge
About the Book:
A sham pastor hires a cocaine-sniffing centaur to act as mascot for an Evangelical mega-church’s arena football team; Paul Revere flashes across a revolutionary sky on the back of a sunbird; an ammo-less infantry drummer and a bleeding medic are beat back to a Best Western parking lot in the Battle of Sacramento — such are the situations contained in Ryan Ridge’s Hunters & Gamblers. Winners of the negative lottery, these characters have learned to love to lose everything until there’s nothing left to lose. And the end is desperate, black, drenched in whiskey, but punctuated by poignancy and revelry and revelation. The tales in this lurid, edgy debut illuminate blackness with even blacker humor and a sense of outlandish beauty.
Digital: E-BOOK FOR KINDLE
Published: July 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9830674-5-0
Trim: 5 x 8
Trailer:
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Praise:
– Reading Ryan Ridge’s wild wheel of stories, large and small, is like crossing the street in London: you look one way but the surprise is coming from the other. The most accurate blurb for this lyrical and boisterous collection would be “Oh oh,” but that would rob the reader of a first reaction. This is a terrific debut of a welcome new talent. – Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies
– Ryan Ridge’s stories are lacerating cuts that expose the gray matter and turbulence of a nation. Beneath the “NASDAQ sky” live crackpots and shack wives, day traders, sham pastors, and artists. What’s comical is ominous and what’s ominous is hilarious in a sad, heart-scalding way like a trick birthday candle that just won’t go out no matter how hard you blow. Ridge’s inventiveness is unlimited, a panoptical lens that lets us see what is part myth and part video and part tazered dream. It’s a compelling collection that leaves you shivering from the strange-in-the-familiar sensation of a wonky moral universe. — Bruce Smith, author of The Other Lover
– Ryan Ridge’s brilliant Hunters & Gamblers reads more like a library than a collection of stories. It takes on a much broader swath of history and eternity (sometimes in the same piece) than most fiction ever does, and the contemporary world (extravagant preachers, feckless dreamers, therapists and astrologers, puzzled spouses, sons, and lovers) snaps across its pages. It’s filled with humor, anger, joy (in language, in existence) bafflement and outrage at the state we’ve brought ourselves to, and its dark vision — accomplished in stories both exquisitely experimental and edgily mainstream — will stay with you long after the book is done. — Paul Griner, author of The German Woman
Listen:
After the Thrill
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Turbulence
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This Will Be the Prime of You Unless You Round Up
And what of the abstract fairy in charge of costumes? From which plane is it that you impart your wisdom and usher us into this realm looking like we just stepped from television?
“Come here,” she said. “We have light in our lungs. We speak into each other’s cheeks. Would you like to buy a puppy?”
“You’re the only one who understands how much it hurts,” I said and hit her.
The street sewn with Christmas lights, carolers serenading parking meters. Runoff from the slaughterhouse drips into the sewer. There is blood in every brain. “Teach me the meaning of the meaning,” she said, but I could not.
There is strangeness in the past months. I get my haircut daily because it grows that fast. The barber is not afraid. I go to his shop. I sit in his chair. I say: “Are you afraid?”
“No,” he says, sharpening his scissors. “Unless by afraid you mean lonely.”
More days come. Not everyone can have a white coat and a gospel. I stay indoors. Winds punish the trees. My neighbor preaches string theory, but I don’t understand.
“Get it?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
He says: “This will be the prime of you unless you round up.”
“Touché,” I say and hit him hard in the stomach.
He doubles over.
I take a vacation.
I wait and wait at the lip of a volcano. Nothing. For lack of a better world, I go home. Now I’m dressed in a Bermuda shirt. My skin looks two-thirds cooked. I’m far from television.