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'Unusual, finely judged and wrought work... has reminded us of the beauty that can be discovered in the ordinary and in ordinary speech.' -- Lydia Davis on AUG 9-FOGA collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young writer In The Dominant Animal - Kathryn Scanlan's adventurous, unsettling debut collection - compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned and teased for maximum impact. A ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress. In these forty very short stories, the ordinary shifts into the uncanny: in living rooms and in hotel rooms, on suburban lawns and on the surgeon's chair, characters - human and animal - eat, breathe, provoke and injure one another. Grandmothers sit tethered to the couch in a blue spell, lonesome men crouch among thorny shrubs, pets expire slowly or suddenly, and the nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet. With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. No mercy, a character says - and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.'Unusual, finely judged and wrought work has reminded us of the beauty that can be discovered in the ordinary and in ordinary speech.' -- Lydia Davis on AUG 9-FOG'In these flawless, gripping, beautiful stories Kathryn Scanlan gives us a picture of life's true uneasy heart.' -- David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On'The Dominant Animal left me feeling uneasy, off-balance and immeasurably better for having read it.' -- Julia Armfield, author of salt slow'Elegantly spare yet exhilarating... A startling, arresting debut.' -- Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them a Good Time 'I read The Dominant Animal in a single sitting and finished it hungry for more of the mercurial, singular, surprising magic Kathryn Scanlan is creating.' -- Megan Nolan'All of life's absurdities and violences are here, dressed up and pulsing with an inimitable energy and intellect that sticks.' -- Rachael Allen, author of Kingdomland

'Looking back, Mrs Fitzgibbons could not recall which of the major changes in her life had come about first, the discovery that she possessed a gift for persuasive speech, or the sudden quickening of her libido.'Forty-five-year-old Frances Fitzgibbons is a loan officer at a New England bank, known for her polite discretion and kindly, tolerant disposition. Suddenly she transforms almost overnight: seducing a high-school student, usurping her boss as vice president, and firing anyone who crosses her.Once Frankie has found her voice - which arrives fully-formed, without hesitation or thought - resistance is futile. It's not long before she has a gang of devoted acolytes, including her hairdresser and son-in-law, and her plans to obliterate the competition can run unchecked, to horrifying effect.First published in 1990 and set against the financial crisis of 1987, Ride a Cockhorse is a rollicking cautionary tale brimful with snappy dialogue and gleeful obscenity - and an irresistibly compelling antiheroine.

'I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.'Four years before she shoots her husband and walks to a cafe for a coffee, a lonely young woman living in a boarding house meets an older man called Alberto. They go for long walks along the river and on the outskirts of the city; they look like lovers, although they're not.Alberto doesn't tell her anything about himself and she asks few questions. Still, with little else to distract her, she lets her imagination run wild and convinces herself to fall in love. Though he doesn't feel the same, Alberto asks her to marry him and they have a baby. But Alberto is a man who tires quickly of everything.The Dry Heart is a short, dark and psychologically rich novel that forensically examines how an unhappy marriage comes to end in murder.

Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is 17, and dreams of marrying a rich man, living in a grand apartment in the city and wearing silk stockings. To escape her father's neglect and her mother's sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini,her sweet and mysterious cousin.When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she's pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort.Nothing, not even Nini's desperate declaration of love, can stop her - but her rejection will be his undoing. The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreamsof youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.

From one of contemporary Russia's finest writers, a spellbinding collection of eighteen stories. Tolstaya's ecstatic and witchy imagination is in full force in autobiographical stories of delivering telegrams in Soviet Russia, conducting an affair with a man who may or may not exist and imagining a world without Italy.

Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary - and yet how typical - her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible transformation from student and labour organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother's battles with the harsh oppression of women. A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is a personal history of modern India, told from the bottom up.