"Tania
Hershman makes immaculate tiny stories that
punch ten times heavier than their weight, as if
a 500 page novel had been ground up and
distilled into capsule form. They are so biting
and so perfect they seem to hang in the air for
moments after you’ve finished reading them, like
little prayers. Emotionally wrenching, funny,
quirky, and full of condensed wisdom, insight
and love, Hershman’s short short stories are
whirring, ticking word machines waiting to
explode inside you."
David
Gaffney, author
of Sawn-Off
Tales, Aromabingo, and
The Half Life of Songs
“Unique
voices of mystery, love and loss in stories
thrumming with big ideas. Elegant and powerful.”
Paddy
O'Reilly,
author, The
End
of
The
World,
The
Factor,
The
Fine
Colour
of
Rust
"The writer Alasdair Gray once described himself
as “a maker of
imagined objects.” It strikes me that
Tania Hershman needs a more
artful descriptor than ‘writer,’ too: brilliant;
mysterious; not of
this earth—I adore her and I adore this book."
Marjorie
Celona, author, Y
|
Published:
May 3rd 2012
Paperback,
96
pages ISBN:
1906477604
ebook ASIN:
B008CS57X2
"Tania Hershman writes with such passion and
playfulness, the pain and the fear and the
hope woven through her stories hits all the
harder. The result is beautiful, funny and
quietly devastating."
Nicola
Walker, actress (Spooks, Inside Men
)
A
scintillating collection of 56 short
fictions by one of the genre’s most
daring exponents, whose economy of
words cloaks her subtlety and power.
Tania Hershman’s work is powerful,
spiky and off-beat but with a
distinct warmth and affection for
her subjects.
My Mother Was an Upright Piano:
Fictions
builds on the strengths of Tania
Hershman's first collection of short
stories
The White Road and
Other Stories, which was
commended by the judges of the 2009
Orange Award for New Writers.
Hershman's fiction is inspiring,
thought-provoking and witty. She is
able to create characters with
distinct voices and explore deep and
sometimes disturbing relationships
in just a few paragraphs of prose.
Her writing style has a lyrical
quality and often the meter of her
work brings added resonance to her
themes.
Read
more about very short stories,
often called flash fiction
>>>
|
|
"Funny,
fresh,
lyrical. These stories are like colorful
glass lozenges holding the substance of our
everyday lives, sparkled up by the unusual and
wondrous."
Aimee
Bender, author of Willful Creatures and
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“This
collection is two rich catalogs interleaved.
In the first, the stories succeed precisely
where their own characters fail: these deft
fictions are full of (and about) the humor and
heartbreak made manifest when communication
fails. In the second, meaning somehow gets
through, albeit not through words, but through
physics, say, or music, say, or love. Together
the two halves lay bare a world where speaking
clearly is nothing short of heroic.”
Roy Kesey, author of Pacazo,
All Over, and
Nothing in the World
"Tania Hershman's fictions are incredible
things which both challenge and
explore the wider picture
whilst honing in on the minutae of
everyday life. Bold, assured and
poetic My Mother Was An Upright Piano:
Fictions confirms Hershman's standing as an
important contemporary voice."
Lee
Rourke, author, The
Canal, Everyday,
A
Brief History of Fables
(ed)
"Simply superb, and anything but simple, these
fictions peel back the layers we build up over
our lives with the sharpest of scalpels: the eye
of that rare creature - a real writer."
Vanessa
Gebbie,
author, Words
From a Glass Bubble, Storm Warning,
The Coward's Tale
|
