Ellipsis (Paperback)

Sean O'Brien

ISBN 10: 095482802X / ISBN 13: 9780954828028

Published by Comma Press, Mytholmroyd, 2005

Paperback. This short story collection features three authors who each contribute half a dozen stories that are linked by their shared setting. Jean Sprackland follows characters clinging to lost dreams and obsessions amid the dunes and fairgrounds of Southport. Set in the derelict rooms and vandalized stairwells of a tower block in south Manchester, Tim Cooke's stories draw intricate spirals around the claustrophobic lives of those who occupy them. Sean O'Brien's voices are also those of lost souls that actively seek their own dereliction, staggering between the vaulted libraries and nocturnal drinking dens of Tyneside. This short story collection features three authors who each contribute half a dozen stories that are linked by their shared setting. Jean Sprackland follows characters clinging to lost dreams and obsessions amid the dunes and fairgrounds of Southport. Set in the derelict rooms and vandalized stairwells of a tower block in south Manchester, Tim Cooke's stories draw intricate spirals around the claustrophobic lives of those who occupy them. Sean O'Brien's voices are also those of lost souls that actively seek their own dereliction, staggering between the vaulted libraries and nocturnal drinking dens of Tyneside. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780954828028

Synopsis:

Ellipsis is a new set of books celebrating the 'short story sequence' - that interlocking daisy-chain of narrative produced when stories knit together to form a continuum of character or theme. An out-of-season seaside town, a library stocked with memories, a man slowly going mad... Starting in the hotels and suburbs of a down-at-heel coastal town, Jean Sprackland's stories follow a cast of rootless characters, young men and women clinging to tokens of the past, whose lives are so lacking in ballast they become as unstable as the dunes themselves. Tim Cooke invites us into a very different space: the derelict rooms and vandalised stairwells of an inner city tower-block. From there, each story draws a claustrophobic spiral round the next, following various characters (or is it the same person?) desperate to flee their demons. Sean O'Brien's stories also spiral outwards - not from a state of mind but a setting: an ornate, vaulted lending library, an edifice from another age, where unlikely users and chance items found in stock lead to quite different lamentations for the past.

About the Author: Sean O Brien was born in London in 1952 and grew up in Hull. He has published seven collections of verse: The Indoor Park (1983), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Frighteners (1987); HMS Glasshouse (1991); Ghost Train (1995); Downriver (2001); Inferno (2006), his verse version of Dante's Inferno; and The Drowned Book (2007). The latter won the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize. Ghost Train, Downriver and The Drowned Book have all won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), making Sean O'Brien the only poet to have won this prize more than once. His essays have been collected in The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry and he was editor of The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland After 1945. He has translated Aristophanes The Birds for the National Theatre, and dramatised novels for broadcast as BBC Radio 4 Classic Serials, including Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (2004) and Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear (2006). His first collection of short fiction The Silence Room was published with Comma in 2009, and his first novel, Afterlife with Picador in 2010. He currently lives in Newcastle. Jean Sprackland's first collection of poetry, Tattoos for Mothers Day (Spike) was shortlisted for the Forward First Book Award and her second, Hard Water (Cape) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2003 T.S. Eliot Award. She lives in Southport. Tim Cooke has been a lecturer, an internet 'imagineer', a magazine editor and a composer of music for television, and film. His unpublished novel 'The Zero-Sum Game' was the source for Penny Woolcock's 2004 film The Principles of Lust.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Ellipsis (Paperback)
Publisher: Comma Press, Mytholmroyd
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: Paperback
Condition: new