Archives de catégorie : London 2022 Fiction

AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE de Paul Dalla Rosa

Oscillating between elation and despair, AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE is the debut short story collection from Sunday Times Short Story Award finalist Paul Dalla Rosa.

AN EXCITING AND VIVID INNER LIFE
by Paul Dalla Rosa
Allen & Unwin, May 2022
(via Neon Literary)

Whether working in food service or in high-end retail, lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director, sharing a dangerous apartment in the city, a rooming house in China or a vacation rental in Mallorca, the protagonists of the ten stories comprising Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion, ambition and aimlessness, the curated profile and the unreliable body.
By turns unsparing and tender, Dalla Rosa explores our lives in late-stage Capitalism, where globalisation and its false promises of connectivity and equity leave us all further alienated and disenfranchised. His stories are small masterpieces of regret, futility and tenderness, dripping with acuity, irony and wit.
Like his acclaimed contemporary Ottessa Moshfegh and the legendary Lucia Berlin, Dalla Rosa is a masterful observer and unflinching eviscerator of our ugly, beautiful attempts at finding meaning in an ugly, beautiful world.

« The contemporary urgency of his stories is intoxicating…. This is such an exciting collection – writing this good is thrilling, exhilarating. » – Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap

Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. His stories have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Meanjin and New York Tyrant. In 2019, his story ‘Comme’ was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. He is currently undertaking his PhD at RMIT University, studying the real within contemporary fiction. An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is his debut collection.

SILVER #1 OF TREASURES AND THIEVES de Stephan Franck

A rollicking vampire-filled graphic novel heist that will keep you guessing until the very end for fans of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Ocean’s Eleven, from award-nominated animator and comic book creator Stephan Franck.

SILVER: OF TREASURES AND THIEVES (Book 1)
by Stephan Franck
‎ Abrams ComicArts, October 2022

There are only two kinds of objects in this world. The ones that shine and the ones that don’t.
SILVER’s protagonist, James Finnigan, only concerns himself with objects from the first category. Those objects don’t hide in plain sight. They hide in dark places.
When Finnigan loses his grifter gang’s lifetime fortune in a heist gone wrong, he stumbles on a consolation prize in the crypt of the Harker Foundation—a notebook that tells of an ancient, immeasurable treasure, accompanied by a bar of pure silver to prove it. It’s a tall tale, but also Finnigan’s only lead. In an effort to make up for what he’s lost, he mounts the heist of the millennium in search of the Silver Dragon. Just one catch: The famed treasure is said to be hidden in a castle full of vampires. 
Set in the noir-pulp era of the 1930s, award-nominated animator Stephan Franck’s Silver is a rip-roaring, genre-bending graphic novel that draws on the best of gothic horror and heist tropes to tell a story that is pure adventure. Silver offers the captivating dynamics of an ensemble cast of misfits, while inviting us to accept that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a tale of fact, not fiction. The result is a smart, innovative story complete with world-class visuals and sharply drawn characters that’s equal parts action, humor, and heart.

Stephan Franck is an animator/writer/director/comic book creator. He was a supervising animator on the cult classic The Iron Giant and contributed story to Despicable Me. He cocreated the animated TV series Corneil & Bernie (Nicktoons-Hub Network), received an Annie Award nomination for Best Director in a TV Program for Smurfs: The Legend of Smurfy Hollow, and supervised the animation of Marvel Studios’ What If…?. He lives in Los Angeles.

DEMON COPPERHEAD de Barbara Kingsolver

A modern retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, which transposes that epic novel, chapter by chapter, to a modern place and time: the American south.

DEMON COPPERHEAD
by Barbara Kingsolver
‎ HarperCollins USA, Fall 2022
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

DEMON COPPERHEAD is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. A modern retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, which transposes that epic novel, chapter by chapter, to a modern place and time: the American south.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of nine bestselling novels, including The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the enormously influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the highest honor for service through the arts in the United States, as well as the prestigious Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her body of work.

CAN I STRAY de Jenna Adams

CAN I STRAY follows the story of Brooke’s age-gap relationship with Matt and the lasting impact it has on her life. It explores themes of consent, mental health, co-dependency and toxic relationships.

CAN I STRAY
by Jenna Adams
‎ Neem Tree Press, October 2022
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

Fourteen-year-old Brooke Tyler has spent her whole life waiting for a boy to choose her. Matt is about to go to university, scared to leave behind everything he knows. When both are cast as romantic leads in Romeo and Juliet, they fulfil the roles of forbidden lovers both on and off the stage. Brooke is sure that her fairy tale is coming true – and best of all, Matt is older.
Brooke considers secrets and lies a small price to pay for her first boyfriend, but the relationship is set to cost her the moment they have sex. When Brooke learns that Matt’s actions that night were illegal, her world shatters.
Years later, Brooke and Matt reunite as adults. Matt wants to undo all the damage he caused, but Brooke makes a choice which forces them both to question their relationship.
Told in three acts, this debut reveals a young woman’s journey for independence as she strays away from everything she has ever known to navigate her traumatic past.

Jenna Adams lives in London and writes from her third-floor flat which is covered in plants. She always has a book in her handbag, and runs a Twitter and Instagram where she posts about her favourite novels.

LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET de Toya Wolfe

For fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Brit Bennett, a striking coming-of-age debut about friendship, community, and resilience, set in the housing projects of Chicago during one life-changing summer.

LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET
by Toya Wolfe
‎ William Morrow, June 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

Even when we lose it all, we find the strength to rebuild. Felicia “Fe Fe” Stevens is living with her vigilantly loving mother and older teenaged brother, whom she adores, in building 4950 of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. It’s the summer of 1999, and her high-rise is next in line to be torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority. She, with the devout Precious Brown and Stacia Buchanan, daughter of a Gangster Disciple Queen-Pin, form a tentative trio and, for a brief moment, carve out for themselves a simple life of Double Dutch and innocence. But when Fe Fe welcomes a mysterious new friend, Tonya, into their fold, the dynamics shift, upending the lives of all four girls.
As their beloved neighborhood falls down around them, so too do their friendships and the structures of the four girls’ families. Fe Fe must make the painful decision of whom she can trust and whom she must let go. Decades later, as she remembers that fateful summer—just before her home was demolished, her life uprooted, and community forever changed—Fe Fe tries to make sense of the grief and fraught bonds that still haunt her and attempts to reclaim the love that never left.
Profound, reverent, and uplifting, LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET explores the risk of connection against the backdrop of racist institutions, the restorative power of knowing and claiming one’s own past, and those defining relationships which form the heartbeat of our lives. Interweaving moments of reckoning and sustaining grace, debut author Toya Wolfe has crafted an era-defining story of finding a home — both in one’s history and in one’s self.

Toya Wolfe grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Chicago Journal, Chicago Reader, Hair Trigger 27, and WarpLand. She is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston-Bessie Head Fiction Award, the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation Short Story Competition, and the Betty Shifflet/John Schultz Short Story Award. She currently resides in Chicago. LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET is her debut novel.