Benjamin Drevlow

A Good Ram is Hard to Find Benjamin Drevlow

"These stories capture the gritty realities of traditional masculinity falling apart. The quiet intensity of stoic fathers give way to big hearted sons who take in the world unguarded. This raw, brutally honest voice had me swinging between hysterical laughter and profound awe. Each page is magnetic and I'm now a forever fan of Drevlow's writing."
Devin Murphy, National Bestselling author of The Boat Runner and Tiny Americans.


"Oh my oh my! What a gritty and poetic bunch of crazy-ass stories! Benjamin Drevlow's A Good Ram is Hard to Find is chock-a-block filled with lonely, troubled misfits searching for kernels of sweetness in their hardscrabble, hard-luck lives. Even while forlorn and forsaken, abused and misunderstood, each character holds tight to their good-hearted, if twisted, sense of humor. Written with guts and pathos, these wonderful tales spark and fizz with an energy that makes this book hard to put down. Find a comfy place to settle in and consume this juicy collection. I'm sure glad I did."
Alice Kaltman, author of Dawg Towne

"What a mysterious and honest book. A Good Ram is Hard to Find captures the everyday violence of poverty, and the strange, beautiful tenacity of people living on the fringe of the working class. Together these stories capture every dark, electric detail of the least populated landscapes of modern America as we descend into what feels like the last days of late capitalism. Each story here lives and breathes and trembles like a living human."

Chris Dennis author of Here is What You Do


"Benjamin Drevlow comes at the reader with a logging chain and a tattoo needle and asks, which is it going to be? Your head or your heart? Can you smell my imagery? He writes true grit lit like the redheaded stepchild of Flannery O'Connor and Harry Crews. Be warned, his humor has a crosscut serrated bite to it. In the title story, "A Good Ram is Hard to Find," a young man struggles to win back his ram's dignity (the ram's name, Arnold Schwarzenegger) and at the same time struggles to discover how to become a man despite the bad hand life dealt him in the family department. In "Mama's Little Helper" a manipulative mama makes her big boy and her brother-in-law complicit in the murder of her husband in a gritty, grotesque, and paradoxically hopeful story about truth you might expect from a writer like Donald Ray Pollock. Drevlow knows, like any good southern writer, that life can be heartbreaking, freakish, and ludicrous all at once. A breakthrough writer you have to know!"
Daren Dean, author of Far Beyond the Pale, The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War, I'll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone: Stories, and This Vale of Tears