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 is a lifelong storyteller. His fiction includes The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked and seven books under his new imprint, Last Kid Books: Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought: Collected Essays, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon and Jailbait.  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. In its first year, Benjamin’s imprint, Last Kid Books, won six independent press awards. His essays have appeared in publications that include the Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Examiner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, EE Times and Common Dreams. Benjamin and his wife Junko Yoshida have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wisconsin and sometimes in Paris.