Richard Skinner Books

Pulling together his years of experience as a novelist and a teacher, Richard Skinner covers the basics of writing great fiction - narrators, characters, settings - with charm and rigour.

Following Viktor Shklovsky's instruction to make everyday objects seem unfamiliar, Richard Skinner's fourth collection sets out to release 'the potential of inanimate objects'. A marbled egg, white balloons, unopened boxes, a Greek island, numbers, a yellow yo-yo - nothing in this book is quite what it seems. Unsettling, precise and enigmatic, Invisible Sun confirms Skinner's reputation as a poet of playful misplacement and misdirection. It is a book about windows, light, clouds, the 'upside down world' glimpsed through shadows and mists, and always the invisible sun - bright source of all life but also our daily measure of time and loss - illuminating 'the distant glitter of other people's lives'.

Mixing fiction and nonfiction, Skinner breathes new imaginative life into the story of a twentieth century icon. Bewitched by the beauty of a troupe of native dancers and the strange music of the gamelan, Margaretha changes her name to Mata Hari and goes to Paris, where she is drawn into a web of espionage resulting in her death by firing squad.

Two striking, utterly original novellas, tales of art and devotion told with playful elegance.