Southeast Missouri State University Press

Weird Pig

Robert Long Foreman

Winner of the Nilsen Prize
Publication: October 1, 2020
Pages: 266

Weird Pig is about Weird Pig, a pig who wants to do right. But doing right isn’t always easy. He drinks. He eats pork chops. He rides a skateboard. He gets his fellow farm animals murdered, and fathers an illegitimate son who has a messiah complex. When Weird Pig leaves the farm he calls home, he inspires a series of children’s books that help bring on the end of his little world—a farm where human and beast alike toil in the shadow of an ever-growing factory livestock complex. From farm to table and beyond, follow the misadventures of Weird Pig in this kaleidoscopic portrait of America, seen through the eyes of a crazed animal who insists on making himself at home there.

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Weird Pig is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Robert Long Foreman has a special talent for capturing the chaos, brutality, and absurdity of life in America. Like Huck Finn meets Animal Farm on acid.”   -Erin Somers, author of Stay Up with Hugo Best

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“Weird Pig is that rarest of beasts, a porcine picaresque, a comic novel that actually induces laughter in humans. In this anthropomorphic spoof of a story, no animal, person, or societal institution is safe from a good old-fashioned literary skewering. Swift and Orwell would be proud, if they weren’t already so dead. Neither the hero we want nor need, Weird Pig may yet be the one we absurdly deserve. Robert Long Foreman is an exceptionally imaginative wit and a new talent to watch.” -Brian Van Reet author of Spoils

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“If you asked Weird Pig to tell you about himself, he’d say he was ‘one in a million.’ And he’d be right. Robert Long Foreman’s Weird Pig is a satire with sharp wit, absurdist humor, and scathing insights that made me laugh and flinch in equal measure. No character or subject is safe from Weird Pig’s lacerating gaze, and through his antihero, Foreman tackles subjects as far ranging as industrial farming, creative writing programs, sex trafficking, the publication industry, addiction, and gun violence. Weird Pig is wonderfully weird, one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever spent time with, and Foreman’s novel is beautifully strange, intelligent, and monstrously funny. I love this book.”  -Joanna Luloff, author of Remind Me Again What Happened

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Robert Long Foreman is the author of  I Am Here to Make Friends, a story collection published by Sundress Pulibcations, and Among Other Things, a collection of essays, which was published in 2017 by Pleiades Press after winning the inaugural Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. He has won a Pushcart Prize for fiction, and has published short stories and essays in such magazines as Agni, Crazyhorse, Electric Literature, and Kenyon Review Online. He has won contests at The Cincinnati Review,Willow Springs, American Literary Review, and The Journal.

Trade Paper, $18.00
ISBN: 9781732039971

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