"The surreal and the mundane coincide brilliantly in Hayden’s inventive debut collection."—Publishers Weekly
"Here are stories to read again and again. Here is language to live in. David Hayden is a serious force.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts
"It’s an open secret that David Hayden is one of the most interesting short story writers around. Why it’s taken this long for his first collection to be published is beyond me but I, along with anyone with even the vaguest interest in looking at modernism anew, will be queuing up for a copy."—Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing
"Once in a blue moon, a book comes along that really is like nothing you’ve ever read before. The 20 stories in this debut collection from David Hayden are strange, uncomfortable fables of memory, metamorphosis, time, disassociation and death: hard to fathom, but impossible to ignore; twisty and riddling, yet with a blunt impact that reverberates long after the final page."—The Guardian
“Hayden's hypnotic combination of oneiric situations with pinpoint language conjures Calvino or Barthleme. His stories are airborne elephants: their lightness of touch belies their emotional weight.”—Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo
“Handle this book with care. Goodness knows where its visions end.”—Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
"Quietly innovative, subtle of tone, full of feeling—this is a superb debut"—Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane
"One of the most startlingly brilliant and original debuts I've ever read. Hayden is one hell of a talent."—David Collard
"Very, very fine fictions, which captivate and seduce the reader . . . Beautiful, luminous, and written with poetic economy and precision.”—David Winters
2018-04-03
Short stories that will puzzle, perplex, and provoke.Irishman Hayden's first book is a collection of 19 stories that invite readers into some puzzling and unfamiliar places: symbolic, surrealist, and language-based worlds. His tales are reminiscent of his countryman Samuel Beckett's Stories and Texts for Nothing. Hayden's book might be subtitled Texts with the Stories Gone. "Dick" is drawn directly from the Beckett playbook. It begins: "Dick is buried up to his belly on a cold shingle beach." Little happens; descriptions of the surroundings are given. "He laughs. He is full of words. They bubble out of his mouth and dribble down his chin." Hayden eschews conventional plots, characters, and narrative flow for ambiguity and words. Striking images and metaphors and new, compound words—"thatmakes," "andeverything"—abound. He invites readers to participate, to peel back the prose, reveal the very process of reading. "Reading" imagines readers as writers living in their own books. As the eponymous narrator of "The Auctioneer" tells us: "The essence of the book is another thing entirely, not the words as such but what lies beneath the words, that is what can set you free." Some stories have a fairy-tale quality to them, like "How to Read a Picture Book." Meet Sorry the Squirrel—"My real name is Maximilian Liebowitz," he says, "but you wouldn't be able to pronounce that now, would you kiddies?" He instructs a group of "little darlings" on how to read a picture book. Some stories possess a grisly, Brothers Grimm quality. In one, a platter with the "blackened, smoking corpse of a man" is on display at a dinner party. Another begins: "My name is Leckerdam and this is how my children killed me." In the ghostly "Memory House," the narrator keeps seeing (maybe) a stranger in his house or maybe it's himself, a "piece of me."Those seeking challenging, nontraditional wordplay stories will find much here to ponder.