The BURIED Book Club discussion

The Hungry Girls and Other Stories by Patricia Eakins. Only 15 ratings (4.53 average) and 8 reviews on Goodreads. Out out print since its first and only edition 30 years ago. New edition coming this December.

"It is a work of imaginative brilliance, a considerable achievement in modest disguise. ... Readers interested in the pleasure of surprising fictions will go out of their way to find Patricia Eakins' triumphantly quirky first book."
— Jonathan Baumbach, The New York Times Book Review, February 5, 1989

"Patricia Eakins' The Hungry Girls is as rare a creature as those that populate its pages, a genuinely original, beautiful, and disturbing work of art. It is a kind of imaginative bestiary for our times, but a bestiary in the same sense that Borges' Ficciones is a collection of myths or that Calvino's Cosmicomics is a scientific treatise. And it shares with these works a lightness of touch, comic wit, and astonishing inventiveness."
— Robert Coover

I'd been meaning to share that one too, in greater detail than just the "unburied reviews" thread! The Hungry Girls was one of the two best buried books I read all last year, actually probably my favorite book of the year hands down. All credit due to the spade wielding of Mark Monday on this one.

Are you reissuing it? I hope you're keeping the illustrations. How did you come across it?

Yes. Tough Poets Press will be reissuing an expanded 30th-anniversary edition in December: http://toughpoets.com/book_eakins.htm

It might even include another story that didn't make the cut the first time. The author decided not to include the original illustrations from the first edition.

I'm pretty sure it was from one of your posts, Nate D., that I first heard about The Hungry Girls.

Glad to hear that I was able to help this marvelous book on its way!

It seems that reviewing buried books is a good way to have one's review buried as well. Anyway, I reviewed Eakins' first (and hopefully not last) novel here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I hope you literary exhumers enjoy.

I'll be interviewing Patricia Eakins for The Collidescope soon.

I just launched a Kickstarter to help defray the production costs for the expanded 30th-anniversary edition of Patricia Eakins's The Hungry Girls and Other Stories.

In addition to the 13 short fictions collected in the original 1989 edition of this book, this new edition includes the story "Black Food," never before published in the United States.

This edition also includes the transcript of Françoise Palleau-Papin's 1998 interview with the author, "A Conversation with Patricia Eakins," as well as "Here Be Dragons," John Richards's new interview with Jeffrey Miller of Cadmus Editions, the original publisher of The Hungry Girls.

Here's the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

Hello, friends.

As promised, here is my interview with Patricia: https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com...

George wrote: "Hello, friends.

As promised, here is my interview with Patricia: https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com..."

Thanks for this - what a fantastic interview! I particularly loved her list of favorite authors, which has done much to make me even more excited to read her work!

Jonathan wrote: "George wrote: "Hello, friends.

As promised, here is my interview with Patricia: https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com..."

Thanks for th..."

My pleasure, Jonathan. Glad you enjoyed it, my friend.

Thanks for this. Great to hear more about Eakins' writing and life.

Nate D wrote: "Thanks for this. Great to hear more about Eakins' writing and life."

Glad you enjoyed it, Nate. It's one of my top favorite interviews so far.