Adam Prince’s highly anticipated debut, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, is a seduction in its own right, a striptease that peals all the way down to the soul. Men attempt to negotiate between their baroque imaginations and the realities of their actual lives in a dark, comic, nuanced, sexed-up collection of stories that might be offensive if it didn’t feel so true.
“The stories feature meth users and junior-high math teachers, old and young, dismal-apartment-poor and McMansion-rich,” writes Michael Ray Taylor in a recent review. “But at their core, each of the protagonists desperately asks the same question as Jim, the narrator’s friend in a surprisingly disturbing story called ‘No Women Tonight’ that is barely 300 words long: ‘We’re men, aren’t we?’”