Funeral Platter is a wonderful, witty collection of very funny and unusual short stories. Its singular characters, truly inventive premises, and manic, propulsive prose make for breakneck reading. Yet, without you knowing how it happened, these stories become genuinely insightful about our darkest secret: our loneliness. Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia
Greg Ames’ trick, his sleight of hand, is to somehow take the absurd and make it vanish into tenderness, to pull laughter out of the particulars of cruelty, and to give each gorgeously rendered sentence a living human tongue. Every story here is its own cabinet of wonders. Funeral Platter is hands down one of the best collections I’ve read in years. David Ryan, author of Animals in Motion
Vivid, witty and surprising, Greg Ames’s stories will move you in unexpected ways. Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and The Burning Girl
If you’re attached to your current understanding of art, table tennis, getting high, fatherhood, ventriloquism, online dating, the vagina, Franz Kafka, haiku, or your friend Mike, Greg Ames’s groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting Funeral Platter is not the story collection for you. If, on the other hand, you think you’re ready for Ames’s life-changing brand of unhinged literary brilliance, first make sure that you’re someplace where it’s socially acceptable to lose your shit. I wasn’t, and now I’ve been banned from drum circle. J. Robert Lennon, author of Mailman
The stories in Greg Ames’ Funeral Platter are dispatches from another planet, a planet that resembles ours, populated by people who look like us, but who are weirder, more unhinged, more dangerous than we are, or at least weirder, more unhinged, more dangerous than we like to think we are. A glorious book—hilarious, unnerving, one of a kind. Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England
I can’t say I’ve ever encountered a collection of stories as wildly varied as Funeral Platter. And so very funny too. This is a book where the ghosts of Kafka and Twain meet up with the likes of Carver and Barry Hannah who are all sitting around the campfire spinning tales of dark humor and candor. Each story told is a radical departure from what has come before it and what comes after. And yet, and then, there is the voice and vision behind each story that belongs entirely to Greg Ames. Bottom line here: This book is a thrill ride into what it means to be alive and stumbling in a world where to be bruised and confused is its own kind of fuel for amusement. Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish
The stories in this collection never ceased to blow my mind. Funeral Platter is a must read. One of the best collections out there. Kim Chinquee, author of Veer