Elsewhere

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• Publisher: Comma Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781910974841
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Index: Literature

What do we mean by small town? How has this innocuous term one up from village, a couple down from city, come to function as a pejorative? Pressed to describe what the phrase small town conjures up, we'd be hard pushed to say anything positive: closed-minded; petty; provincial; parochial. On a broad European canvas, however, the rich traditions of short story writing challenge these preconceptions. The stories collected here are neither narrow-minded nor petty, nor do the minds of their protagonists contract to fit their environment. In Germany, a house-husband is slowly sent over the edge by his over-achieving neighbours. In the town of Odda in Norway, a middle-aged Morrissey fan has a matter of hours to find a girlfriend so his ailing mother can die in peace. It s the small gestures a white lie, the turning of a blind eye, a small kindness or a secret kept that allow the characters of these communities to survive, to breathe easily within the seemingly tight strictures life there can impose. It s how we do things round here...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• It was just, Yesterday
• My Career in Goodness
• Sing Me to Sleep
• She was Singing
• Zurek Soup
• Fog Island
• Calcutta
• The Closeted Pensioner
• The Water People
• We Did It Because We Had To
• Contributors
• Special Thanks