Ed Allen writes in a rich, hearty style about middlebrow Americans living lives of spiritual and cultural improverishment. In case you missed my point, that's three areas of value bound up together: wealth, mediocrity, and poverty. Would the reader expect the resulting brew to be a disaster? Far from it. Allen zeroes in on the particulars of our shared culture with a perspective that reminds me of nothing so much as the pop-influenced writing of the New Journalists of the late 1960s; the early work of Tom Wolfe comes to mind.

They have such an irresistible voice and such a rich rhythm of observation they transform the mere stuff of the external world into shimmering significance . . . What motivates Ed Allen's characters is often puzzling and perverse, and therefore strangely familiar and powerfully irresistible to us.

In this collection of seventeen stories memory is potent, senses are sharp, and insight is keen. . . . What lingers are Allen's succinct word pictures and vividly crystallized moments.

I don't know another writer quite like Ed Allen . . . brilliant, offbeat . . . an insider giving us the lowdown on American life.

Ate It Anyway is a very thoughtful, funny book, written by a mature and compelling author. The stories are loaded with beautiful sentences and very smart insights, impressive especially because the voice within them seems truly unique and distinct.

Allen is a genius at rendering the second-rate colleges, chain hotels, and franchise restaurants of America's suburbs and Flyover. Amidst all the shrink-wrap and cinderblock and artificial grass, he conjures up people and incidents who leave him (and us) terribly sad, hilariously amused, and, quite often, suffused with unbearable wonder and longing. This is a long-overdue collection from an exceptionally imaginative writer.