Scent

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• Publisher: Comma Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781910974629
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Index: Literature

Before his untimely death at the age of 47, Dinesh Allirajah was one of the most versatile and accomplished writers working in the North of England. Whether as a performance poet, literary critic, wry social commentator or masterfully understated short story writer, his work was always international in scope, but local and personal in touch. Witty, irreverent, and intricately observed, his writing was informed by everything from raregroove jazz to experimental theatre, crime noir to stand-up comedy. Yet it always felt, and continues to feel, bespoke to us as readers. The short stories, in particular, allow us to eavesdrop on the most intimate, unattended moments in their characters lives. Here, we get to know outsiders migrant workers, beleaguered mothers, old and unwanted regulars in a pub that's facing a refurb people being slowly ushered into the background, or kept at a distance. Yet it is on these peripheries far from where everyone else is looking that Dinesh finds his stories, here that identities are reconstructed and renegotiated, here that we learn the most about ourselves. Spanning over twenty years work, this definitive volume presents a through-line of Dinesh's compassion, activism, and literary perspicacity; a clarion call to find essential beauty - in art, music, sport, life - and to pass it on.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• The Short Stories
• The Longhand Option
• Easy on the Rose’s
• The Prisoners
• Overnight
• Scent
• Items One to Seventeen
• A Different Sky
• A Memory of Sap
• The Words to Tell Them
• Towelling Elbow Patch
• The Final Mr Benn Twist
• San Miguel de los Helados
• The Frank Sinatra Joke
• Giving Away Soap
• Microdrama
• Blue Hazey
• The Shaman in Norman’s Shoe’s
• The Café Storch Piece
• Dirty Feet on the Saint
• The Sun, One Saturday
• Child I
• Rubbish Zorros
• I Used to Get Lost in Manchester Too
• Child II
• In Dreams
• Real Time Selected Blog Posts, 2011-2014
• The Single Moment
• ‘The Practice of Art isn’t to Make a Living. It’s to Make your Soul Grow’
• The Power of Invisibility
• Coffee Spoons
• Katherine Mansfield: ‘A Dill Pickle’
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘Babylon Revisited’
• The Physics of Language
• Capturing Snowflakes
• Ernest Hemingway: ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’
• Interesting Times… Sun… News of the World…
• Peripheral Vision
• Margaret Murphy: ‘Low Visibility’
• Isaac Babel: ‘The Aroma Of Odessa’
• David Constantine: ‘Tea at the Midland’
• The Hermetic Space
• Hassan Blasim: ‘The Reality and The Record’
• W. W. Jacobs: ‘The Monkey’s Paw’
• What Do You Want To Know?
• What do you Mean Funny? Funny How? How am I Funny?
• Kate Chopin: ‘The Story of an Hour’
• The Hate Inside The Inkwell
• The Agonies and Alleyways
• The Claymatian Inside
• Where Can I Order A Sleepy Bell-Boy?
• I’ll Be C-ing U
• Sunrise Over Wavertree
• ‘The Sea has Neither Reason nor Pity.’
• Banal Fabulous
• Nobody Mentioned The Ted Stockings
• The Poems
• Bashful Alley
• Before the Bluebells
• This Poem
• Rights & Humanity Film#2
• On Girl Nine
• Tags
• Curling Towards Sleep
• Driving Her Around
• I Said, Excuse Me
• The Imperfection of Language
• Into, Into
• Shouty Nut Soul
• Lone Re-Arranger
• Dig That
• Next Thought
• Out Vout A-Go-Go
• Shaft Gets Shagged
• The Heard World (Rwanda Now)
• The Ultimate Passenger Picture Show
• Very Likely
• Zong
• Afterword
• About the Author