Love Stories for Hectic People
The thirty-three flash fictions of Love Stories for Hectic People explore the alignment of beings that is love. There is love that is vulgar, love that knows no reason; there is love that cradles the act of living, love that springs through the cracks; love that is slaughtered. These tales take place from Italy to Ghana to Greece and London and Tokyo, in grainy cities and muted hotel rooms; there is a Mafia murder, an ambulance rescue worker and a woman whose husband falls off a mountain. There is unchaste attraction and slippery, nuanced love; police violence and porn, and fishing too.
| Weight | 0.140000 |
|---|---|
| ISBN13/Barcode | 9781916111547 |
| ISBN10 | 1916111548 |
| Author | catherine McNamara |
| Binding | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Date Published | 2nd March 2021 |
| Pages | 99 |
| Publisher | Reflex Press |
Praise for Love Stories for Hectic People
I rarely receive a review copy, sit right down and read most of it in one sitting. Catherine McNamara’s Love Stories for Hectic People had me doing that. It’s a beguiling collection of flash fiction – the author’s third – that’s as briskly inventive and various as the form demands, embracing sensuality and ugliness in equal measure, and darting from one international encounter to another. Love lies at the heart of the matter, each time round, but grief and brutality are there, too.’The country where he was born had scorched hills and quixotic animals and wise elders with spectacularly gnarled toes…’
—Michael Caines, Brixton Review of Books
Like a raconteur in a lamplit Venetian bar, McNamara understands the charm and architecture of a tale. These structurally compressed fictions still cover significant ground as one consequence topples like a domino into the next, and conflicts modulate between forms. Yet, unlike a bar-room raconteur, McNamara rarely offers us easy resolutions. Her characters wrestle through their cosmopolitan situations, while lust, violence, and repulsion simmer in the midst of romance, sensuality, and intimacy. Love Stories for Hectic People is that rare thing – a book that gets better with each re-reading. McNamara has produced, in these stylish modern fables, a sophisticated study of relationships. She holds up an ornate mirror flecked with shadows.
—Michael Loveday, Three Men on the Edge
Catherine McNamara is one of the best writers I’ve read in all the time I’ve been in publishing. She can do more in two hundred words than most writers can do in two hundred pages. By turns real, funny, dark, magic, ugly, and beautiful. This collection rocks.
—Christopher James, Jellyfish Review
Seductive love, evaporating love and sometimes ‘increasingly superb’ love: it’s all in these pages. Sharp, witty and deeply real, these small stories reveal moments of connections, and sometimes dissolution. One can’t help but be captivated by these many and varied truths, as examined by Catherine McNamara – and the conclusion, despite the darkness, that ‘Love Is an Infinite Victory’.
—Michelle Elvy, the everrumble
Sometimes quiet and reflective, sometimes sensual and visceral, these thirty-three short pieces are assured meditations on the foibles and complexities of love – the making and unmaking of it. This collection drifts across continents and cultures, slowly unbuttoning aspects of relationships between an eclectic cast of characters, and the places they find themselves.
—K.M. Elkes, All That Is Between Us