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Prepare to enter a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems, where elephants squat in living rooms, plastic ducks fall from the skies and even the rabbits can't be trusted. The fifty-eight stories in Jonathan Pinnock's Scott Prize-winning collection
Dot Dash show a vivid yet disciplined imagination at work.
These stories, many of which have individually won prizes, are populated by a rich variety of characters, including a tightrope-walking couple with marital issues, a graffiti artist with an agenda and an interviewee who's about to find out some awkward truths about himself. Very few of them turn out to be completely innocent, and none of them remains unaffected by the experience.
Jonathan Pinnock's unashamedly entertaining fictions explore what happens when the macabre and the absurd crash headlong into everyday life. As writer Tania Hershman says, he 'isn't content to just pull back the curtain, but sets fire to it and chuckles as it blazes'. With this incendiary first collection, he invites readers to pull up a chair and watch the flames rise.
List of contents
- Not So Much a Rough Guide
- rZr and Napoleon
- The Drought
- Convalescence
- Surveillance
- Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions
- Steaming
- The Amazing Arnolfini and His Wife
- Pulse
- Breathe In, Breathe Out
- Fair Trade
- Nature's Banquet
- Internal Affairs
- Return to Cairo
- Think Tank
- The Problem With Pork
- After the Rapture
- Natural Selection
- Less Than Deadly
- Possible Side Effects
- Misunderstandings
- Mr Nathwani's Haiku
- The Experiment
- Anniversary Feast
- Perfect Moment
- How I Became a New Man and What Good It Did Me
- Love Story, Day One
- The Guitarist's Inheritance
- Love Story, Week One
- So What Are You Up To These Days?
- Love Story, Month One
- Fishermen's Tales
- Love Story, Year One
- Hidden Shallows
- Opposites
- Advice re Elephants
- Big Teeth
- The Birdman of Farringdon Road
- Making Conversation
- Piss and Patchouli
- "I Love You"
- A Plague of Yellow Plastic Ducks
- Frogs
- Mirror, Mirror
- Inbox
- The Magnolia Bedroom
- Tribute Act
- The Last Words of Emanuel Prettyjohn
- Bad Grammar
- Farewell Symphony
- Under the Statue
- At Nana's
- Proper Job
- After Michelangelo
- Sidelong
- Canine Mathematics
- Upwardly Mobile
- Somewhat Less Than Thirty Pieces
- Acknowledgements
- Dots
- Dashes
About the author
Jonathan Pinnock is the author of Mrs Darcy Versus the Aliens (Proxima Books, 2011), which occasionally gets included in lists of things that should never have been done to Jane Austen, and several other books. His stories and poems have won a few prizes and have been read on BBC Radio 4. He is founder of the online poetry magazine Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis (www.spillingcocoa.com).
