The Melting Grandmother

Is GiGi—Biggy’s grandmother—a living repository of all past human adventures, or is she a liar? And will she keep shrinking until she disappears forever from the wonderful book-smelling room in her house on Lake Street

GiGi has told Biggy that she’s a thousand years old and that she went through the looking glass with Alice. She was a Spanish princess captured off a galleon by Blackbeard and she was a G.I. at the liberation of Auschwitz. She knew the Brothers Grimm and she was with Vonnegut during the Dresden firestorm. This all can’t be true but she explains it all so believably—and Biggy wants to believe. Especially, he wants to believe that GiGi will never die.

In fourteen stories and sketches that dance from GiGi’s library to the mystic mountains of Japan and the deck of the Queen Mary, David Benjamin leads the reader through fields of imagination as fertile as the fancies of Biggy’s melting grandmother … an altar boy’s nightmare at eight o’clock Mass … the hellish deathscape of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 … a comic murder mystery on the high seas … a troubled girl whose perfect breasts seem to live a life separate from her own … and “The Ballad of Hockomock Mick” … 

In all, a hodgepodge of mystery, comedy, horror, whimsy and surprise from “a gifted storyteller.”

David Benjamin began his career as a storyteller in Mrs. Poss’ second-grade class at St. Mary’s School in Tomah, Wisconsin. His fictional memoir, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, originally published by Random House, was reprinted by Last Kid Books in 2019. His Last Kid Books include a collection of his essays, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought, two  short story anthologies, The Melting Grandmother and Other Short Works and Christmas in a Jugular Vein and sixteen novels, Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon, They Shot Kennedy, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love, Witness to the Crucifixion, Choose Moose, Bistro Nights, The Voice of the Dog and Benjamin’s Jim Otis mystery series, Jailbait, Bastard’s Bluff, Woman Trouble, Dead Shot and Cheat. As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport.

Since its launch in 2019, Benjamin’s publishing imprint, Last Kid Books, has won more than forty independent-press awards. These include, for They Shot Kennedy, the Midwest Book Awards’ 2021 grand prize for literary/historical/contemporary fiction, and a 2022 Silver Medal for Humor to Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s prestigious Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Benjamin and his wife, Junko Yoshida, have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wis., and the rest of the time in Paris.