Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts

One part absurd humor, one part social commentary, Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts throws the most unlikely couples into bed together. This hilarious book includes a man mistaken for a bush, a mermaid refugee, a bird who dreams of weaponizing cats, a boy with a computer for a face, and a woman in love with a severed arm. These and more are the weird and lonely characters who drag their broken hearts through this collection, diligently searching for someone to stitch them up.

Allen C. Jones’ debut collection reads like a meeting between Peter Carey, Nikolai Gogol, and Lydia Millet where the task at hand is to write a love story. While the surface of these stories seems humorous and even absurd, beneath it runs a desperate nostalgia carried by a set of characters who will do anything to force their way back into love.

‘Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts is a weirdly exquisite collection of short stories, a riotously unpredictable but entertaining examination of absurd human life, and the thin boundaries that separate us from what we perceive as ‘other’. For lovers of the literary surreal.’ — Eugen Bacon, award-winning author of Serengotti

‘In Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts, Allen C. Jones doesn't let reality get in the way of what's true. With a poet's incisiveness and command of the symbolic, Jones lays bare his characters' shocking, shameful and tender interior worlds. The mayhem that results is as hilarious as it is confronting. For anyone who has ever felt big, weird and/or lonely, this collection is a reminder that you are in good company.’ — Andrew Roff, author of The Teeth of a Slow Machine

‘How to characterize Allen C. Jones’s Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts? “Experimental fiction” seems too poor a term. In fiction, as in science, an experiment is, by definition, a brave failure. Is this, then, a book of fabulism? Satire? Magical realism? You will find them here, but not as you know them. What leaves me breathless and inarticulate about Jones’s collection is how each story is written so entirely on its own terms. Each its own world, its own universe. Each experiment its own dazzling and unlikely success.’ — Adam Prince, author of The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men

‘The worlds of Allen C. Jones' short fiction are places where anything and everything can happen. Darkly comic, highly entertaining, and with a healthy dose of the absurd, yet always striving to illuminate the big, weird, lonely hearts within. An exciting debut collection by a writer playing gleefully at the outer limits of imagination.’ — Wayne Marshall, author of Shirl

‘Funny, observant, compassionate and wildly inventive, the stories in Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts surprise at every turn. Jones has a way of looking at the world that is offbeat, enchanting and hugely entertaining.’ — Fiona Robertson, author of If You’re Happy