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Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down
A sentient zombie starves for intelligent brains and meaningful relationships in an increasingly vapid world.
A newly single woman struggles to keep up with a creepy, near-future beauty culture.
Anthropomorphic furniture ruins a man’s health, career, and love life.
A woman gets eaten alive by a well-meaning boyfriend.
The surreal landscape of the stories in this award-winning collection shines a fish-eye lens on the female experience while taking a shockingly hilarious plunge into themes of addiction, abuse, sex, and gender roles.
“Dickson James’ crisp prose energizes her stories, which readers will speed through with relish.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Precise, unflinching prose” — Allison Moore, writer for Disney’s Wish
A newly single woman struggles to keep up with a creepy, near-future beauty culture.
Anthropomorphic furniture ruins a man’s health, career, and love life.
A woman gets eaten alive by a well-meaning boyfriend.
The surreal landscape of the stories in this award-winning collection shines a fish-eye lens on the female experience while taking a shockingly hilarious plunge into themes of addiction, abuse, sex, and gender roles.
“Dickson James’ crisp prose energizes her stories, which readers will speed through with relish.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Precise, unflinching prose” — Allison Moore, writer for Disney’s Wish
281 pages, Paperback
Published October 11, 2023
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23 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 20, 2024
In her new book, Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down, Anna Dickson James demonstrates a literary range that is truly astonishing. The domestic dramas "Proud to Be a Shriner's Wife" and "Who's a Good Girl?" share a cover with the Anderson-esque "The Girl in the Piñata," strange tales like "Mersa and the Cannibal" and "Stayin' Alive," and even a zombie story, "Sommelier Mort Vivant." The threads that run through it all are a fearless expression of modern womanhood and a complete command of the text. Dickson James is a writer of exceptional talent who keenly observes the triumphs and trials of women in all stages of life, and then delivers those lives back to us in delicious, captivating prose. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
February 1, 2024
This collection of short stories is a combination of speculative fiction and realism in which the elements of fabulism are woven so tightly into the realism of life, they feel like a world we could climb into or out of. And by comparison, the real world is pushed so far to its extreme that it feels fabulist, magical, both dark and beautiful, frightening and erotic. These are stories of desire - the things we desire and the way those impulses bubble up from places we don't understand; the things we are told we should desire by our family and culture and all the influences constantly bombarding us; and finally, the things we desire but cannot attain because of our own limitations, be they body or mental. What's particularly striking is Dickson Jame's scalpel blade upon the experience of female bodies, excising their experiences one deft stroke at a time, revealing all the ways women desire and are denied or neglected or rejected or told their desires are unimportant, negligible. And each story is richly told with language that is nothing less than deeply, vividly sensual. These stories slide across the skin, caress the mind, and rake their fingernails through our visions of our culture, our future, and our lives as we live them now. A beautiful read that will make you think and feel, and most importantly, think about what it is that you are feeling.
December 17, 2023
Sublime sublimation.
The characters in these stories are consumed, drowned, burned and worn away by daily life, by love and desire and marriage, by hungers of all sorts. They are sublimated in the physical sense--a change of state--as well as in the psychological sense of turning socially unacceptable impulses into ones our strange society will allow. I may be making it all sound too cerebral, because these stories are also witty, honed, sexy and darkly funny.
The cover and title are perfect, but the real treasure here is in the author’s careful work. These stories, even the fantastical ones, flow smoothly and seemingly effortlessly, which is of course the end result of untold hours of effort and craft. Because of that, while practiced readers will enjoy this work, it would also be an excellent book to give someone who doesn’t usually read short stories. This work places the reader in the hands of a writer with a great deal to say and the talent to convey it. She has subsumed herself into these pages, and reading this book and meeting the many facets of her weird and wonderful brain is a true joy.
The characters in these stories are consumed, drowned, burned and worn away by daily life, by love and desire and marriage, by hungers of all sorts. They are sublimated in the physical sense--a change of state--as well as in the psychological sense of turning socially unacceptable impulses into ones our strange society will allow. I may be making it all sound too cerebral, because these stories are also witty, honed, sexy and darkly funny.
The cover and title are perfect, but the real treasure here is in the author’s careful work. These stories, even the fantastical ones, flow smoothly and seemingly effortlessly, which is of course the end result of untold hours of effort and craft. Because of that, while practiced readers will enjoy this work, it would also be an excellent book to give someone who doesn’t usually read short stories. This work places the reader in the hands of a writer with a great deal to say and the talent to convey it. She has subsumed herself into these pages, and reading this book and meeting the many facets of her weird and wonderful brain is a true joy.
October 21, 2024
What a fun, creative, and fabulously well-written collection! I had the opportunity to hear the author read one of her stories at an event in Baltimore -- a blend of horror, humor, and outright genius -- so I had to read the rest of it. With most collections, I usually find a handful of stories that stand out for the right reasons, while the balance of the book is less than memorable. BOYS BUY ME DRINKS is the exact opposite, with just about every story leaving an indelible mark. My favorites: "Sommelier Mort Vivant," "Rebound," and the title story. I absolutely love the title of this book, by the way, which is a combination of ridiculously clever and laugh-out-loud funny and, in some spots, a little depressing. It's one of my favorite reads of 2024.
February 26, 2025
A must read for feminists young and old, and those who love them. James creatively explores and exposes relationship, sexual, emotional, spiritual, physical, and economic costs of societal gender roles on females. Wisdom emerges from these pages if we take the time savor each work individually and as a collection. James’s wildly creative mind makes this book a fun ride that will stay with you for years to come. Enjoy!
August 24, 2024
Compelling and quirky, this compilation of short stories leaves you thinking and turning over the characters and situations for months.
October 19, 2023
First of all, just an A+ title. No notes. I saw this book outsell almost everything else on the Whiskey Tit table at Brooklyn Book Fest a few weeks ago - the author wasn't even there - just on the browsing strength of its title and glorious cover art. Seriously. Look at that shit. Who wouldn't want to read this book?
And fortunately for all those enthusiastic cover-judgers, the pages inside absolutely live up to the promise of their candy-coating. Anna Dickson James's short stories - deftly winding together the surreal and the all-too-real like a giant spiral lollipop - are guaranteed to sate any literary sweet tooth, even while occasionally acting as a lure into a pervert's unmarked van.
Opener "The Art of Drowning," and fourth entry "Who's a Good Girl?" serve as excellent examples of this dichotomy, the former a fantastical fable of interchangeable twin sisters reminiscent of Kelly Link, the latter a miniature family portrait of curdled privilege more akin to Raymond Carver. And yet, despite their stark stylistic differences, this early pair both go right at the cloistered feminist ennui that runs through the entire book; the ways in which women can twist themselves up into pretzel knots of doubt and uncertainty as to their very identities; can lose track of themselves just trying to exist in a world that always has other ideas for who and how they should be.
Up next is "Rebound," a slice of near-future nightlife in which the Instagram filtered perfection of today has fully evolved into the IRL accessories of tomorrow. Epoxy pore-fillers, Chia-like hair regrowth formulas, and Instaplasty detachable nosejobs all make appearances as one woman attempts to tightrope walk the uncanny valley, only to wind up face-to-face with the grotesquerie of the "beauty revolution." Later on, "The Rapture of Anne Marie Abbot" gives us another woman hemmed in by outsized expectations – this time, those of a proper pastor's wife cum anonymous sex addict – who finds her own sacredly profane salvation twerking for collection plate singles in the backroom of a strip club.
In between these two lies the book's magical absurdist centerpiece (and the inspiration for that Carmen Miranda technicolor cover), "The Girl in the Piñata." This tale of perseverance over lonesome anxiety and taking chances in the name of optimistic love is positively bursting (not unlike the giant papier-mâché donkey in question) with the color and charm of a well-executed kids book for adults, just begging to be adapted into a Pixar short.
James has a wonderful talent for capturing distinctly altered psychological states – be it depression, inebriation, addiction, or agoraphobia. She eases you into her characters' problems such that you feel them before you quite realize how you got there, or just how deep they run. Via grandly simple metaphors like zombies and cannibalism and room-sized recliners that recall Kafka's harrow, she reveals exacting truths about both the enormity, and the mundanity of daily life, not just for her cornucopia of restless seeker heroines, but for all of us.
Her men are lost without their women, whether they realize it or not, and her women are lost in a world built by and for their men. Indeed, by the time you get to the penultimate/title story – a stark reminder of the risks women take every day, and how inherently different it is for them than it is for men to engage in activities as casual as drinking alone or talking to strangers – you might well find yourself expecting the worst (I certainly did). All the hard-bitten depictions of ossified chauvinism and feminist dreams deferred that preceded it only serve to heighten its agonizing tension.
But if you're one of the many who judged this book by its fetching title and adorable cover, take heart. Amid all the bright, and loud, and nonsensically distracting catastrophes and wonders in between, the two stories represented there are the ones in which Dickson's lost men and women find their way to some semblance of hope; to truly seeing one another, not just as equals, but simply as people. Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down is an A+ title, to be sure, but the best parts of these stories come when James’s women figure out whatever it is that they need – that ineffable thing that they’ve always needed – to stand back up.
And fortunately for all those enthusiastic cover-judgers, the pages inside absolutely live up to the promise of their candy-coating. Anna Dickson James's short stories - deftly winding together the surreal and the all-too-real like a giant spiral lollipop - are guaranteed to sate any literary sweet tooth, even while occasionally acting as a lure into a pervert's unmarked van.
Opener "The Art of Drowning," and fourth entry "Who's a Good Girl?" serve as excellent examples of this dichotomy, the former a fantastical fable of interchangeable twin sisters reminiscent of Kelly Link, the latter a miniature family portrait of curdled privilege more akin to Raymond Carver. And yet, despite their stark stylistic differences, this early pair both go right at the cloistered feminist ennui that runs through the entire book; the ways in which women can twist themselves up into pretzel knots of doubt and uncertainty as to their very identities; can lose track of themselves just trying to exist in a world that always has other ideas for who and how they should be.
Up next is "Rebound," a slice of near-future nightlife in which the Instagram filtered perfection of today has fully evolved into the IRL accessories of tomorrow. Epoxy pore-fillers, Chia-like hair regrowth formulas, and Instaplasty detachable nosejobs all make appearances as one woman attempts to tightrope walk the uncanny valley, only to wind up face-to-face with the grotesquerie of the "beauty revolution." Later on, "The Rapture of Anne Marie Abbot" gives us another woman hemmed in by outsized expectations – this time, those of a proper pastor's wife cum anonymous sex addict – who finds her own sacredly profane salvation twerking for collection plate singles in the backroom of a strip club.
In between these two lies the book's magical absurdist centerpiece (and the inspiration for that Carmen Miranda technicolor cover), "The Girl in the Piñata." This tale of perseverance over lonesome anxiety and taking chances in the name of optimistic love is positively bursting (not unlike the giant papier-mâché donkey in question) with the color and charm of a well-executed kids book for adults, just begging to be adapted into a Pixar short.
James has a wonderful talent for capturing distinctly altered psychological states – be it depression, inebriation, addiction, or agoraphobia. She eases you into her characters' problems such that you feel them before you quite realize how you got there, or just how deep they run. Via grandly simple metaphors like zombies and cannibalism and room-sized recliners that recall Kafka's harrow, she reveals exacting truths about both the enormity, and the mundanity of daily life, not just for her cornucopia of restless seeker heroines, but for all of us.
Her men are lost without their women, whether they realize it or not, and her women are lost in a world built by and for their men. Indeed, by the time you get to the penultimate/title story – a stark reminder of the risks women take every day, and how inherently different it is for them than it is for men to engage in activities as casual as drinking alone or talking to strangers – you might well find yourself expecting the worst (I certainly did). All the hard-bitten depictions of ossified chauvinism and feminist dreams deferred that preceded it only serve to heighten its agonizing tension.
But if you're one of the many who judged this book by its fetching title and adorable cover, take heart. Amid all the bright, and loud, and nonsensically distracting catastrophes and wonders in between, the two stories represented there are the ones in which Dickson's lost men and women find their way to some semblance of hope; to truly seeing one another, not just as equals, but simply as people. Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down is an A+ title, to be sure, but the best parts of these stories come when James’s women figure out whatever it is that they need – that ineffable thing that they’ve always needed – to stand back up.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews