The Half-Life of Songs
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Salt Publishing
Published:1st Nov '10
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This is David Gaffney’s latest collection of micro stories. We see a world where thinking is illegal, belly dancers’ blood is used to fertilize tomato plants, pensioners in leather trousers dance to two-step garage, and an architect steals crested newts and hides them in his bath.
The stories are often beyond odd yet always ordinary, a warped backward-talking world of Lynchian surreality, allowing an emotional insight into the rich interior lives of social outsiders, the broken and the easily-breakable, perpetually on the fringes of our world.
About Sawn Off Tales
Witty, clever, poignant, Gaffney's micro fictions work as funny routines, moving insights and illuminating character sketches.
-- Time OutAbout Sawn off Tales:
Utterly brilliant. Hilariously demented and wonderfully succinct. David Gaffney’s Sawn-Off Tales are little McNuggets of pure gold.
-- Graham RawleAbout Sawn Off Tales:
Sad, funny fables recalling evanescent moments of connection and happiness. One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.
-- Nicholas Clee * The Guardian *Gaffney has produced the kind of book that makes you wish you spent more time locked in your imagination and less time dismissing irreverent thoughts. I wish Gaffney was allowed 15 minutes of time with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to make his vision come to life.
-- Lianne Steinbery * The Big Issue *About Aromabingo:
A triumph of the blurring of literary boundaries with a dose of unabashed comic bravura and honouring British writing with the awkward, self-conscious, yet jagged aplomb it so deservedly needs.
* The Short Review *About Aromabingo:
Offbeat, unsettling and yet frequently hilarious, Aromabingo is a solid step on from the accomplished Sawn Off Tales and proof that David Gaffney is one of those names to watch.
* Bookmunch *About Never Never:
Gaffney’s strength is creating strong characters, and this debut brims with them. With a ruthless eye and pitch-black humour, Gaffney explores a consumer culture in which exploiting the welfare system is both a necessity and an addiction, and in which hypocrisy is endemic
* The Observer *Loaded with potent charges, insidious and cumulative in their effects. In Gaffney’s fiction thoughts take physical form, and the material world has a surreal vitality … The stories are sometimes haunting, and sometimes comic. The Half-life is an appropriate metaphor for the lingering effect they have on the reader.
-- Nicholas Clee * Times Literary Suppleme- Long-listed for Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story 2011 (UK)
ISBN: 9781844717750
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 15mm
Weight: unknown
208 pages