Captives, by Angela Meyer

Captives opens with a husband pointing his gun at his wife. There’s a woman who hears ‘the hiss of Beelzebub behind people’s voices’, a photographer who captures the desire to suicide, a man locked in a toilet who may never get out, a couple who grow young, and a prisoner who learns to swallow like a python. There’s a touch of Annie Proulx in these stories, the way a lonely death can creep up on you and the way our sexuality will not be denied, though we may try to cover it up. You will enjoy Angela’s subtle writing and curious mind. Some stories feature flights into the magical, reminiscent of Roald Dahl, with the space and perception of Raymond Carver. Every story inspires us to re-think the extraordinary possibilities of life in an ordinary world.

That night we made love like teenagers. By the time we got to mum and dad’s we had shrunk down to half-size, and we walked hand in hand, smiling, with sugar floss for thoughts. —from ‘My sweetheart saw a child’s face in the train window’

Already listed on Readings ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2014′, we are looking forward to this chapbook-size collection of very short stories and relish the opportunity to publish on paper and between covers a genre that has come into its own in the digital age. Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Atwood and Raymond Carver are the elders of this form now also known as short shorts, sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction and prose poems or flash fictions. To find out more about flash fiction read how UK writer Tania Hershman defines it. Add Captives to your Goodreads here.