Items related to Why Don't You Stop Talking
An exhilarating collection of stories from the legendary Jackie Kay.
In Jackie Kay's first collection of stories, ordinary lives are transformed by secrets. Her world might seem familiar - sex, death and family cast long shadows - but the roles of mothers, daughters and lovers are imagined and revealed in the most surprising of ways. Jackie Kay sees the extraordinary in everyday life, and lights it up with humour and generosity in a way that is uniquely her own.
This recording is unabridged. Typically abridged audiobooks are not more than 60% of the author's work and as low as 30% with characters and plotlines removed.
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Review:
Fear, fantasy, loneliness and desire are the themes of Jackie Kay's debut collection of short stories, Why Don't You Stop Talking. Brian the fitter in "Shark! Shark!" has a hysterical fear of sharks that dominates his life. In "Big Milk" a woman's passionate jealousy of her lesbian lover's relationship with her baby forces her to revisit her own childhood. Kay has a particular talent for describing the physical manifestations of psychological troubles. In "The woman with knife and fork disorder" the breakdown of the ability to organise cutlery stands in for a woman's mental dissolution in response to sudden abandonment by her husband, while in the Kafkaesque "Shell", a stoical, isolated single mother turns slowly and painfully into a tortoise. If you want to see what happens when the stylistic resonances of Borges and Gogol meet impeccable feminism, this is it.
Review:
Many of these stories mediate an uncertain boundary between the literal and the metaphorical, and much of their pleasure and challenge lies in this ambivalence. Kay's poetic voice is well suited to the short story form. This is the Jackie Kay of The Adoption Papers and Off Colour: serious, redemptive, forcing the consumer-sanitised reader to recognise the truly impoverished, traumatised reality around them. The heart-aching "In between talking about the elephant" is a particularly brilliant example of how fantasy enables people to survive the banal inevitability of the ordinary experience of death. Kay is good on the troubled relationships between teenagers and their parents and there are a number of lighter and energetically comical stories that add levity to the otherwise twilight tone of this collection. Why Don't You Stop Talking is a memorable collection about the pathology of everyday life. Through these stories, Kay fundamentally challenges and renders suspicious the notion that there are such beings as untroubled, ordinary people.--Rachel Holmes
'A haunting, beautifully written debut' Times; 'Miraculously convincing and beautifully written' Daily Telegraph; 'An incredibly powerful novel, rich and satisfying' Guardian
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- PublisherWhole Story Audiobooks
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1471230554
- ISBN 13 9781471230554
- BindingAudio CD
- Number of pages6
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