Funeral Platter, Ames’s kaleidoscopic follow-up to his award-winning novel Buffalo Lockjaw, might be the literary offspring of Etgar Keret and Amelia Gray we did not know we wanted. Ames manages to locate humor everywhere—from the absurd rituals of courtship to the burdens of American manhood to the bizarre things we do out of familial love. Ames playfully ducks expectations offering a fun house world where your parents spend their retirement cheerfully caged and your sister cuddles up each night with the burnt log she named Marilyn.
“Vivid, witty and surprising, Greg Ames’s stories will move you in unexpected ways.” —Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
“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 The Innocents and Others
Greg Ames is the author of Buffalo Lockjaw, a novel that won the NAIBA Book of the Year Award, and Funeral Platter, a collection of twenty short stories published in hardcover by Arcade in 2017. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Southern Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review, Catapult, and The Sun, among others. He was raised in Buffalo, New York, and has lived in several cities around the world. He now splits his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Hamilton, New York, where he is an associate professor of English at Colgate University.