About this item
"Allen’s concise book’s power lies within its understated irony, never more heavy-handed than a preacher’s admonition that 'a world without mans is a world without us all.' The plain narrative and relationship between boy and female man, rounded out with humor and occasional (sometimes literal) bite, promises to be a sleeper favorite among speculative audiences."--Publishers Weekly“Allen...throws caution to the wind with his bizarre but exquisitely composed fable that uses transhumanism as the prism to reflect on the nature of humanity...It’s also intellectually curious and rather cutting in many of its conceptual and cultural assessments. It’s a world where man is not only pet, but also meat, where religion, wars and empires are just as backward as they are in our own world, and where worlds collide with a temperamental angst that is as uncomfortable as it is alluring.
About the Author
Preston L. Allen grew up in Boston and Miami, where as a latchkey eldest brother of five he learned to tell stories to entertain the others and keep them from bouncing off the walls while their parents were at work.
A recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction and winner of the Sonja H. Stone Prize in Literature, he is author of the short story collection Churchboys and Other Sinners (Carolina Wren Press 2003) and the novels All or Nothing (Akashic 2007) and Jesus Boy (Akashic 2010) , which "O the Oprah Magazine" listed as one of "Ten More Titles to Read Now," Dennis Lehane called "a tender masterpiece," and about which the New York Times proclaimed, "no one does church sexy like Allen."
His short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and have been anthologized in Miami Noir, Las Vegas Noir, Brown Sugar, Wanderlust, Making the Hook Up, and Here We Are: an Anthology of South Florida Writers.
His latest novel, Every Boy Should Have a Man, which has been called by Booklist "Imaginative, versatile, and daring," is about, well, boys in a fictive world who own men as pets.
He holds a BA in English from the University of Florida and an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. He lives and teaches writing in South Florida.
