Famous Children and Famished Adults

“Hampton’s fictions challenge us by surprising us. Deceiving us with surface simplicity, they turn on themselves to create something larger, an understory very much alive and unpredictable as well as psychological. In fact, each of these stories seem like pearls inside the oyster of a narrator’s mind. ‘An oyster forms a pearl in response to irritation. Something unwanted gets into its shell, and the oyster envelops it, to make it more like itself.’”
—Rain Taxi

“Evelyn Hampton's stories are terrific, unexpected word events: some built from subverted and perverted romcom premises; some lucid dreamt metaphors extended past absurdity to return to wisdom; some pre-splintered into archaeological shards but with the knowledge of our ruins vibrating within. Or, as Hampton writes, these are ‘another encounter with Madam.’ Elsewhere, the derangements of childhood find home in voices skillfully projected into non-orphans writhing with unsatisfied wants, panting and parentless beside their American moms and dads. In Hampton's work, there is a writing of emptiness that I love. You should re-pot that plant, you should pulverize the deluging content into mist, you should enter the center of the wasp—and you should read Evelyn Hampton.”
—Eugene Lim, author of Dear Cyborgs

“Evelyn Hampton’s stories are marvels, spells cast by a magical hand. Here objects are ensouled; cats vanish by the hundreds; children shrink; mother-remnants persist. The exotic and the toxic intermingle, the has-been and the husband. I hear Pliny, Beckett, Lewis Carroll—echoes of other beguiling and clamorously spooky worlds. Hampton makes anything possible.”
—Noy Holland, author of I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like

“I cannot say enough about Famous Children and Famished Adults. Structured with an oddball, stringent logic, this is a modern masterpiece that boldly sings in cadences funny, wrenching, linguistically bold, and sweetly hopeful. It’s the work of a time/space traveling superhero, a linguistic Ninja. Brava!”
—Lynn Crawford, author of Shankus Kitto: A Saga