In Are You Hungry?, J.J. Colagrande gives us a vivid, erratic, and ultimately unforgettable ride through contemporary America’s underside—where yoga meets roulette, where poverty meets performance, and where storytelling becomes both confession and catharsis. Published by Jitney Books, a proudly Miami-rooted press, the book unfolds as a triptych: a collection of linked and unlinked stories that channel the voice of a nation fumbling for meaning inside its own delusions. This is fiction with an open fly, America talking to itself in the mirror after too many drinks.
Colagrande’s gift is rhythm. His stories—especially “Looking for Margarita,” which opens the collection like a cracked neon sign buzzing—are delivered in a kinetic first-person voice that is part beat poet, part stand-up comic, part manic street preacher. Keith, the protagonist of this Vegas-set odyssey, is a lost yogi looking for a waitress who may or may not exist. Or may or may not love him. Or may or may not be a prostitute. What begins as a desperate romantic search becomes an extended metaphor for America’s obsession with chance, identity, and illusion. There’s something theatrical about Keith’s narration. He speaks in spirals and mantras, making every detour another step on his spiritual disintegration.
The entire story takes place in a single day, but its emotional span feels longer. Colagrande builds momentum with recursive dialogue and interior monologue, pushing the reader deeper into Keith’s paranoia. Characters come and go like slot machine hallucinations: Boom Boom, Uncle Vinny, Lorraine/Scarlet—caricatures of Vegas nightlife who may just be extensions of Keith’s own psychological fragmentation.
But it’s not chaos for chaos’ sake. Colagrande is playing with form. The story reads like a confessional one-man show—almost theatrical in structure. We’re Keith’s audience, and like the hotel clerk David he speaks to, we have no choice but to listen. And slowly, we realize: it’s not about Margarita at all.
Are You Hungry? Review
The second part of the book, “Little Ado About Nothing,” is an odd and experimental interlude. Here, Colagrande dips into poetic surrealism, offering fragmented sketches of places—San Francisco, Paris, New Orleans—through the eyes of a character named “nothing.” There’s no plot here, but there is tone: ironic, wistful, and jazz-inflected. These pages function as palate cleansers between the heavier narrative arcs, even if they flirt with indulgence.
Then we arrive in Florida. The final section is rooted in Miami and its orbit: Coral Springs, the Keys, cruise ships, the psychic heat of South Florida. Stories like “The Green Crusader” and “The Box” are grounded in realism, but always with a tilt. One centers on a privileged twenty-something trust-fund kid defecating on hundred-dollar bills in public toilets as an anti-capitalist performance. Another follows a pizza delivery guy in Coral Springs unraveling the strange secret of an old coworker’s mysterious cardboard box. These stories evoke a dirty, dazzling localism—tropically absurd but emotionally sincere.
Colagrande’s Miami isn’t pastel and yachts. It’s immigrant, weird, broke, sunburnt. It’s where people hustle, con, lose their minds, or find a new one. There’s also a deep tenderness here—especially in “The Sea Lion,” a story about a father trying (and failing) to impress his daughter during a weekend visit. The final image—him pretending to be a sea lion to make her laugh—is equal parts ridiculous and heartbreaking. And that’s Colagrande’s alchemy: take something pathetic, rub it raw until it shines.
The title of the book is a question, and it’s not rhetorical. Everyone in these pages is hungry—for love, for a break, for spiritual absolution, for connection. Hunger becomes a stand-in for longing itself. What Colagrande suggests, wisely, is that hunger isn’t the problem. It’s the choices we make to feed it.
Click here for more info and to buy the book.
