Jigs & Reels - Hardcover

Harris, Joanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385606427 ISBN 13: 9780385606424

Publisher: Doubleday, 2004

Synopsis

Take your partners, please. Suburban witches, defiant old ladies, ageing monsters, suicidal Lottery winners, wolf men, dolphin women and middle-aged manufacturers of erotic leatherwear: in these twenty-two short stories from the author of Holy Fools and Five Quarters of the Orange, the miraculous goes hand-in-hand with the mundane, the sour with the sweet, and the beautiful, the grotesque, the seductive and the disturbing are never more than one step away. Jigs & Reels is Joanne Harris’s first collection of short stories. As she says in her foreword, a good short story can startle, ignite, and illuminate...giving you vivid, anarchic glimpses into different worlds, different people. Here, she proves she is as good as her word by creating an eclectic selection of tales for our times that will delight, surprise, entertain and horrify in equal measure. Sly, funny, sometimes provocative but always personal, Jigs & Reels shows a side to Joanne Harris you have never seen before. So go on, be tempted. After all, it's only dancing.

About this title

Review:

The quirky tales in Joanne Harris' first collection of short stories, Jigs and Reels, can best be summed up in two words: malevolent and mischievous. As with many of her full-length novels, Harris manages to cleverly combine ordinary--even humdrum--situations and characters with the extraordinary and the unexpected. Tales with a twist indeed.

Harris lets her formidable imagination run riot in Jigs and Reels. This is a rich and wondrous Pandora's box of the odd, the strange, the weird and the downright wicked. Many of her protagonists wreak satisfying revenge on the unsuspecting, in both comical and cringingly gory fashion.

Long enough to get your teeth into, but short enough to read in a flash of the eye, these 22 stories are startlingly different--from pensioners with a penchant for Manolos, to a magical cookbook that bites back; from school reunions with a difference to adventure games taken seriously. And what characters pop out of their slender pages, as large and as deeply rounded as in any novel. Ladies who breakfast at Tesco's, with dark secrets to mull over; limbless swimmers who fall dangerously in love, honeymooners who fall prey to the aphrodisiac qualities of fish, authors whose long-forgotten, half-finished novels come back to haunt them and lottery winners who bet on the ultimate, impossible odds.

In her introduction, Harris says she finds the process of short-story writing slow and difficult and accepts that success is never guaranteed. In truth, not every tale here works, but when it does, it is stunning--and in the spirit of one of her literary heroes, Ray Bradbury--lingers teasingly in the sub-conscious.

Joanne Harris is an anarchic storyteller, delighting in taking her reader by surprise and leaving them reeling. --Carey Green

Review:

'...tantalising and suggestive, and leave us wanting more’ -- SUNDAY TIMES

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0385606427
• ISBN 13: 9780385606424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288