Synopsis
Robert Stone, author of the National Book Award winner Dog Soldiers, returns with this collection of stories and novellas involving violence, longing, black humor, and various vices.
The New York Times - Antonya Nelson
Stone combines highly realistic and contemporary-seeming people and scenarios with an old-fashioned loyalty to the traditional sources of conflict. In these pages, it's quite plausible that you will encounter not only Man versus Self but also Man versus Nature. How refreshing…It's true you might resist wanting to know the people in Fun With Problems or, maybe more tellingly, seeing yourself in them. You might turn away from the uncomfortable truths you don't wish to receive, from the mature, dissolute, ultimately heartbreaking rites of passage that fill these pages. But a genuine coming-of-age story demands that its subject resist the experience. No book is for everyone, but some books can be fully taken in only when the reader is ready. Fun With Problems is a book for grown-ups, for people prepared to absorb the news of the world that it announces, for people both grateful and a little uneasy in finding a writer brave enough to be the bearer.