Attrib. and Other Stories
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"It's just the real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing this book. I love it in a way I usually reserve for people."
--Max Porter
A dazzling, prizewinning short story collection that showcases a bold new talent
Eley Williams has been a literary sensation ever since this collection of experimental short fiction was published in the UK. Lauded as "elegant" (The Guardian) and "exhilarating" (Vanity Fair), Attrib. and Other Stories won the James Tait Black Prize, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was named a best book of the year by The Guardian.
Attrib. presents a cast of unforgettable characters standing at the precipice of emotional events (a disastrous breakup, a successful date, an unexpected arrival) and finding it fiendishly impossible to express themselves. With intimate, irreverent, and playful prose, Eley Williams rejoices in both the possibilities and limitations of language, as well as the very human need to be known and understood--despite our own best efforts.
Original and inventive in the vein of Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, and Amy Hempel, these stories are "emotionally delicate and tenderly introspective" (New Statesman) and "an absolute must-read" (The London Magazine).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British writer Williams's diverting collection (after The Liar's Dictionary) combines wordplay and narrative to chart her characters' attempts to find meaning. In "The Alphabet," flirtation, romance, and memory are explored through each letter's attendant associations as the narrator, addressing her partner, loses her ability to express herself because of worsening aphasia (" ‘You can't spell aphrodisiac without aphasia,' you said later, trying to make a filthy joke out of it and holding me"). In "Concision," the narrator, while on a silent phone call with an erstwhile lover, meditates on words in other languages that have no analogue in English, such as the Finnish word löyly for a sauna's steam. "Spins," set during a London gloaming, demonstrates the author's acute powers of observation: "clouds make a candy-colour of the evening, the passers-by have conversations that marble together like endpapers." Williams is strongest, however, when she diverts from rhetorical games. In "Spines," a vacationing family notices a distressed hedgehog treading water in a pool. The question of whether to save it reveals the lesson-focused cruelty of the family patriarch: "If it thinks we'll scoop it out each time, it won't learn." Williams explores pathos and the dictionary with aplomb and a fresh voice. Anglophiles and linguistic schemers will savor this.
