An American missionary sleeps on the dung floor in a witch doctor’s hut in South Africa. Two women contemplate “poverty porn” while trying to start a

nonprofit in China. An heiress locks eyes with a whore on the streets of Cape Town. A college girl stalks Mickey Rourke. A professor from New Jersey gets scammed in Old Havana before Castro’s demise. A mom obsesses about the fate of Sesame Street characters. A study abroad student goes home with a Russian street artist. Backpackers question their global idealism. Terrain, both ordinary and extraordinary, works on the imaginations and perceptions of people on the run, freaks in the making, eccentrics by choice.

The short stories in this collection explore, both implicitly and explicitly, the notion of freakiness. They worry over eccentricity, alienation, normalcy, and intimacy. What is it that makes one a freak, makes one want to embrace quirkiness, have the fortitude to cultivate oddity? Is there a fine line between abnormality and the extraordinary?

If you’d like a Reading Guide or Book Club Questions, please go here.

What They’re Saying!

The stories of The Freak Chronicles explore the margins of human behavior and psychology, thereby challenging what it might even mean to be normal or a freak. Spiegel’s fiction is hip and edgy, as the subject matter suggests, but never at the expense of her literary art. She makes use of pop culture and the gritty stuff of real lives to explore the theme of human alienation—and she does all this with a literary finesse that charms and impresses. I admire these stories greatly.

—Okla Elliott, author of From the Crooked Timber

The Freak Chronicles is a miracle of a story collection: passionately political and a shout of ambivalence about political passion, intensely personal and furiously global. We readers are lucky to find Jennifer Spiegel, a writer who is self-satirizing and vulnerable and elegant as hell.

—Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia, The Monsters of Templeton, and Delicate Edible Birds

 

A great review by Roman Gladstone at Chamber Four.

The Freak Chronicles is named one of the Best Books of 2012 here!

The Freak Chronicles is listed in Library Journal's column "Goodbye 2012: Terrific Short Story Collections and Small-Press Bests.” Gasp! It’s a short story collection that couldn’t be forgotten!

I’m thrilled that Okla Elliott, your very atypical/not-basic-at-all chic pomo-literati intellectual, put The Freak Chronicles on his Best Books of 2012 list for Heavy Feather Review.

In the “Fabulous News Department,” Lara Howard Smith names both The Freak Chronicles and Love Slave among her Best Books of 2012! Go here.

Here’s a very nice mention of the dialogue by Tim Horvath in The Collagist.

OTHER FREAK THINGS . . . .

I wrote a guest post for The Quivering Pen, this great series put together by David Abrams on writing and publishing “firsts.” I wrote mine on “My First Flop.”

Larghearted Boy: A Music and Literature Blog posted the soundtrack to The Freak Chronicles.

Steve Almond interviewed me in The Nervous Breakdown. He said that it seems like I have a big mouth. I’m deeply moved.

The Story Prize included “Jennifer Spiegel’s Three Worst Stories--So Far” on their official blog. The Freak Chronicles is an entry in the 2012 contest for a short story collection.

I posted photos on Facebook in the album "Changing Hands Bookstore 7/13/12"