Shapes Found for Living offers short tales—rumours and fables coalescing from the uneven experience of living in this century and vivifying the reader’s imagined memory theatre. The collection moves from rude immediacy via questioning forms of language depicting unstable mental states, the near madness of trying to live or love, to the absurd remnants of an (envisioned) ancestral recall.
‘My perception is altered…in a good way, that is.’
–> Patrick Keiller
‘This book reads like a waking dream in which some of my most cherished obsessions—animals, paths, woven things—take on ever-changing, vaguely threatening forms. Beginning with a series of fifty-two gloriously inconclusive endings, it goes on to wrong-foot its reader in every aphoristic and elliptical ‘puddle of plenty nothing’. A string of sausages is transformed into a string of sentences, wherein call centre workers on zero-hours contracts lay bets on a tightrope walker falling. Nothing I have read in a long time approaches this entanglement of the familiar and the baffling, and nothing these sentences have touched—from rabbits to ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’—will ever look the same again.’
–> Ellen Dillon
120 pages
105 mm x 170 mm
60 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN
978-1-7385079-4-8
£12.50
Shapes Found for Living – MA Bibliothèque, April, 2025
