The Melancholy of Anatomy - Stories

Zusatztext "Witty! multilayered! and beautifully written : a startling and memorable collection." —Ali Smith! author of Hotel World "These tales prance and pirouette along the edge of the surreal. Sometimes they dive directly in! to bring back a sense of elegance! rightness! and great wisdom."—Samuel R. Delany! author of Dhalgren "Shelley Jackson is a gifted writer . . . who! very playfully! very disturbingly! takes the body apart and puts it back together again! always in startlingly imaginative ways. These tales of the anatomy's ludicrous sorrows are deliciously crafted! maintaining always a fine balance between outrageous comedy and profound melancholy. She is . . . one of the most poised and original talents of her generation." —Robert Coover! author of Pricksongs & Descants "She erases the boundaries between body and self! secretion and shedding! love and loathing! enveloping the reader in a slippery! icky! fascinating world." — The Village Voice Literary Supplement Informationen zum Autor Shelley Jackson Klappentext Amusing, touching, and unsettling, The Melancholy of Anatomy is that most wonderful of fictions, one that makes us see the world in an entirely new light. Here is the body turned inside out, its members set free, its humors released upon the world. Hearts bigger than planets devour light and warp the space around them; the city of London has a menstrual flow that gushes through its underground pipes; gobs of phlegm cement friendships and sexual relationships; and a floating fetus larger than a human becomes the new town pastor. In this debut story collection, Shelley Jackson rewrites our private passages, and translates the dumb show of the body into prose as gorgeous as it is unhygienic.HEART There are hearts bigger than planets: black hearts that absorb light, hope, and dust particles, that eat comets and space probes. Motionless, sullen dirigibles, they hang in the empty space between galaxies. We can't see them, but we know they're there, fattening. They give off a kind of light, but it is a backwards light that races inward away from the onlooker to hide itself from view, so this light, whose color we would so much like to know (maybe it's a color we haven't seen before, for which we must sprout new eyes), looks more like darkness than any ordinary darkness, and seems to suck the sight from our eyes, and make itself visible in the form of a blind spot. Dark hearts, heavier than weight itself. Too heavy for reality to bear, they punch a hole in it, and sink through into the dream underneath. They throb dully at the bottom of a gravity well. We might sit by the side and drop a line, if we knew what kind of bait to use, but if we hooked the heart, could we lift it? And if the melancholy behemoth sounded of its own accord, bothered by our flies and sinkers, and we netted it, wouldn't it collapse on the deck, exhausted by its own gravity? No, it is unkind to wrest these hearts out of hiding. Toss pennies in the hole, instead. Dump a martini off the poop of the spaceship, blow a kiss through a porthole and clear off, friend. The heart warps everything around it. Where nothing is, emptiness itself is twisted, its features distorted beyond all recognition. This is why people rail against the heart. It is bad enough to change everything that is, but when nothingness itself is altered, something must be done. If we hold ourselves still, at the moment the year turns over, we can feel a faint beat. That is the black heart continuing its patient, serious work. What work? I am trying to find out. I have given my life to observing the hearts. Observing, of course, is the wrong word for the patient cultivation of blind spots, for trying to understand, by the ways in which, yes, I do not understand, what the heart is. In this investigation, invisibility is evidence, blindness the...

Product details

• Authors: Shelley Jackson
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 02.04.2002
• EAN: 9780385721202
• ISBN: 978-0-385-72120-2
• No. of pages: 192
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 203 mm x 11 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature