Attrib and Other Stories

Description

by Williams, Eley | Fiction & related items
Published 06/03/2017 by Influx Press in the United Kingdom
Paperback | 176 pages

This debut collection from Eley Williams centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way in which one’s thoughts — absurd, encompassing, oblique — may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm.

Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. This is writing that centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to ‘own’ their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds.

With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose, the inability to communicate exactly what we mean dominates this bold debut collection from one of Britain’s most original new writers.

‘She is a writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own: witty, melancholy, occasionally sensual, occasionally mordant, elegantly droll without the kind of hipster quirkiness that makes me want to hurl books at the wall. She has in common with George Saunders the ability to be both playful and profound, and we are lucky to have her.’
– Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

‘I came late to Eley Williams and am happy to have found her. Hearing her read her short story ‘Smote’ aloud recently blew me away.’
– Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under