SIs GiGi—Biggy’s grandmother—a living repository of all past human adventures, or os she a liar? And will she keep shrinking until she disappears 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—and did not like—the Brothers Grimm and she was with Kurt 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 landscape of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 … school lunch invaded by a miserly Congressman … a comic murder mystery on the high seas … a troubled girl whose transcendently perfect breasts seem to live a separate life from her own … and “The Ballad of Hockomock Mick” …

The Melting Grandmother collects the cream of “short works” by David Benjamin that have accumulated over a span of more than forty years. Benjamin serves up a literary smorgasbord of mystery and heartbreak, biting satire, comedy, horror, whimsy and surprise from a “gifted storyteller.”

“Think of this one,” says the author, “as bedtime stories for insomniac grownups.”

AWARDS: Foreword Indies Book of the Year Awards, Finalist, Short Stories (Adult Fiction), 2024