Unsteady States, Volume One

More about the book

The first volume of John Fraser's selected short stories and novellas features: The White Room (from Animal Tales) Sheep (from Happy Always) The Scorpions (from Enterprising Women) Lenin in the Cinema (from Black Masks) Where the Philosophers Go (from Short Lives) Starting Over (from Blue Light) Broken Chords (from Three Beauties) John Fraser lives near Rome. Previously, he worked in England and Canada. Of Fraser's fiction the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller has written: 'One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature oeuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus's forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.'