Attrib: and other stories - Softcover

Eley Williams

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910312169 ISBN 13: 9781910312162

Publisher: Influx Press, 2017

Synopsis

Winner of the 2018 James Tait Black Prize

Winner Of The 2018 Republic Of Consciousness Prize

Longlisted for the 2018 Dylan Thomas prize

New Statesman Books of the Year 2017

The Telegraph Books of the Year 2017

The Guardian Best Books of the Year 2017

The White Review Books of the Year 2017

Australian Book Review Books of the Year 2017

This debut collection from Eley Williams centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way in which one's thoughts - absurd, encompassing, oblique - may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm.

Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. This is writing that centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to 'own' their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds.

With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose, the inability to communicate exactly what we mean dominates this bold new collection from one of Britain's unique and most original new writers.

About this title

Review:

'She is a writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own.' -- (Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent)

'It's exhilarating to dive into the associative rush of Williams's writing.' -- (Vanity Fair)

'It is impossible not to identify with Williams's candid observations of the quirks and quandaries of emotional life. Her experimentation is not a case of obfuscation: we come away feeling that we know precisely what she means.' -- (Times Literary Supplement)

'It proved you can generate acrobatic, edge-of-your-seat fiction, from little more than random arcana.' -- (The Telegraph, Books of the Year 2017)

'Eley Williams's Attrib. And Other Stories cornered the market in cerebral playfulness.' -- (The Guardian, Best Books of the Year 2017)

'No fiction writer was more exciting on sentence level than Eley Williams.' -- (The White Review)

'Announces the arrival of an idiosyncratic, virtuosic new voice in British writing.' --(The Cardiff Review)

'Think William Gass, Lydia Davis or Anne Carson, and you won't be too wrong.' -- (Michael Hoffmann, London Review of Books)

'There's no one working in the UK quite like her.' (Joanna Walsh)

'An emotionally delicate and tenderly introspective collection.' -- (New Statesman)

'Funny, playful and utterly bravura.' -- (Melissa Harrison, Financial Times)

'It's just the real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing this book. I love it in a way I usually reserve for people.' -- (Max Porter, author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers)

'The possibilities these stories imply are many, one of them being that you, the reader, could be their unnamed narrator. That's why, like all good literature, they feel so personal, immediate and incredibly urgent.' -- (New Humanist)

'Williams' writerly roots in poetry and poetic prose shine throughout this stunning collection of almost intimidatingly intelligent and creative work.' -- (Mslexia)

'So good it makes me giddy. For God's sake, buy a copy.' -- (Caught by the River)

'A joyous collection of moments, of love, of language, with such a light, skilled touch.' --(Aliya Whiteley, author of The Beauty)

About the Author:

Eley Williams lives and work in Ealing. She is co-editor of fiction at 3:AM magazine and assists the independent publishers Copy Press. Her prose has appeared in the journals Ambit, Night & Day, The Dial and Structo; in 2005, she was awarded the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize and her work has been shortlisted twice in The White Review's Short Story Prize. She teaches both creative writing and children's literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she was recently awarded her doctorate.

About this edition

• Publisher: Influx Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1910312169
• ISBN 13: 9781910312162
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176