Dressing up For the Carnival - Softcover

In "Dressing Down", the vigorous nudist and his wife separate and the story captures her final poignant gesture towards amends. In the hilarious "Invention", a husband is left behind when his wife finds fame after inventing the steering wheel muff and the narrator traces an ancestral line of inventors including a shepherd who discovered day-dreaming and others who developed the hyphen, word space and full-stop. This story brings together the main concerns of this collection: the investigation of long-term intimacies of people who inhabit "parallel weather systems" and a self-conscious teasing of the short story form. In "A Scarf", a failed writer who's eschewed "beginnings, middles and ends" for a feminist structure ends up removing her navel by plastic surgery after an unkind remark by her husband. Her friend fails to articulate the truth about a misunderstanding and realises that not one woman in her life "was going to get what we wanted..." and remained "too kind ... not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want." In "Ilk", a polished and wry spoof on academic musings about "buds of narrativity", a young untenured professor wonders where she stands on "narrative enclosures". A jammed vowel key in "Absence", forces the writer to complete the story without the use of this letter and creates a clever literary pun. One of the best stories is "Windows", in which two artists struggle against a new government tax on glass and have to paint in artificial light until they resolve their light-less gloom through art itself.

A provocative, tricky and often serious collection which asks profound questions of short fiction and love's mechanisms for survival.--Cherry Smyth