2025:
Shapes Found for Living – MA Bibliothèque, April, 2025
SHAPES FOUND FOR LIVING
Books in dreams were once made of scrolls and parchments. Once, books in dreams could only manifest themselves as clay. Scratches became meaningful. Books still tumble down. Most rooms are flooded; the waters are generally at ankle height.
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.
‘From edible aphoristic confections to Punch and Judy sausage satire, Norton is extraordinarily adept when it comes to framing his imagination. Each story is like a cosmic X-ray revealing the contents of an incredibly lively mind, brought to earth and capturing the swirl of his mind at play. This is not so much a collection as a mesh eloping.’
–> Rachel Genn
‘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
‘My perception is altered…in a good way, that is.’
–> Patrick Keiller
Nick Norton is a writer, based in Leeds, the author of novels, short stories, and a researcher of fable-function, formulating the ‘Aesopic Body’ as a figurative manner of exploring fiction that is both critical and humorous. Building the Aesopic Body is published by SPTM! Other writings can be found in Minor Literature[s], 3:AM, The Happy Hypocrite, Soanyway, and elsewhere. He initiated and curated the project Library Interventions, from 2013 to 2020, enabling artists, writers, and performers to enact the creative potential of research.
https://mabibliotheque.cargo.site/Nick-Norton-SHAPES-FOUND-FOR-LIVING-2025
2024:
minor li[s]t include my short reflection on The Lion’s Share
Three short pieces will appear in the Dunlin Press anthology: Objects.
Objects will be ‘launched’ at the Small Publisher’s Fair, London, 25/26 October.
Launched Building the Aesopic Body
In great company with new writing by:
Moosje M Goosen, Before I was alive I was a stone
Halla Einarsdóttir, To Boob
Isabel Marcos, Blood and Soap
Daniel Tuomey, Stuck, an inheritance
Minor Literature[s] publish Editing the Aesopic Body
Soanyway publish Avoiding the pig’s invite to private chambers
Hem Press publish What We Did During the Apocalypse: The Archive of the Babel Tower Notice Board. The anthology includes my short prose pieces Loop-de-Loop & One to Ten
Writing the Aesopic Body: Fables from the Anthropause
Completed my doctoral thesis, and successfully defended my viva!
A practice-based Ph.D. The novel and the critical context combined. More on the novel in due course.
Previous work:
Drim – short story in Mechanics’ Institute Review
Departure – short story in Mikrokosmos
Shri Shri told us a story of the seeds’ coming and going. A tale was told of how some of our collected seed could be taken to the black earth left over by the fat river’s thinning. After the fat river thinned, we were to push seed into the black earth.
I This Is – short story, Tether’s End
The big picture is made up of many miniatures…
They say I have stolen the car…
The children are in the yard playing cats-cradle…
Chanting operatic, an urgently angled choir approach…
The geologist is waiting at the junction. The artefactist pauses, empties their pockets, glances around suspiciously.
‘What’s this?’
Perdix and a Pear Tree – short story, Entropy Magazine
“This,” Perdix admitted, “is no place for one accustomed to the open field. This is no place for one befriended of the curvature of earthen beauty. This is no place. This is nowhere, this air has never before held aloft the wing. Or not, at least, the wing of feather. And no fox ever made it so deep…”
Loop-de-Loop & One to Ten – short prose, Babel Tower
Deep down I’m a real Cuddly Club sort of a squirrel. I’m cute and of educational value. Now don’t laugh.
………. The missile rattled and bounced and clacked, as if a tumbling die.
The three of us stood contemplating a dull, oppressive silence. I took an extra two steps towards the ladder as a scratching and scuttling began. ………
Lagoon, sloshing and grunting hotly, we proceed. On occasion I get a panorama of damp and oddly hairy hills. A rolling rope-slung range is breaking the waves, vanishing again; three heads elegantly pulling; three folded and puckered ruminating heads.
Walking Sentences: disappearing and reappearing
Sentence walks.
Walking the sentence.
Waking the sense.
Rat Birds – short story, Fictive Dream
The pigeons have spotted me. They are corkscrewing down, spinning out from the fronts of buildings. Feeling small and dizzy, I stand still and allow this flapping cloud to descend on me. The swoosh and crack of wing, the deafening rattle of their cooing chests. I half shut my eyes, hair whipping around my face in the commotion. Birds thump onto my outspread arms and some even jab their uncertain weight onto my head before scrabbling for the food.
The Goat and the Bridge – short story, Shooter
Nick Norton in “The Goat and the Bridge” weaves an offbeat fable about a goat who resists tradition to overcome a loathsome foe.
The Bicycle Theft – short story, Bird’s Thumb
Emperor Starling – short story, Eqoque Ezine
The Court is a network of wind, a breath of dancing wing. I will not fly in The Court for my song is to be epic. The song of The Court is a thread of murmur tied to a cloud.
The Exemplar – short story, Cabinet of Heed
Dust is shaken onto the tiles…
Zeno Press publish Mirror Learning, the Loosened Forms of Pleasure
I collaborate with Joey Chin on the work: Dear Farrah
An Awkward Heart in Storgy
The Bear in The Fiction Pool
Only One Silver Teapot – short story, The Happy Hypocrite, Tolstoyevsky
In the Toothpaste – short story, The Cabinet of Heed
Yet These Birds Do Fly – short story, Idle Ink
The Gates – short story, Epoque Press Ezine
The Opening – short story, Shooter
Paranoid Raptures – short story, Adjacent Pineapple
Edwards – short story, Here Comes Everyone (The Brutal Issue)
How Now – short story, Fictive Dream
BEEZER: Library Interventions – essay, Artists Book Year Book
I collaborate with Nicola Dale on ‘It Stare us Down’
The Alpha Recital – Short story, Honest Ulsterman
Tales From the Original Land – Short story, Fictive Dream
AKA: A Genealogy of the Saddle – Book Works / Hull Freedom Festival
A joy to read, Nick Norton’s wonderful book brings a headlong, associative sensibility to the literature of landscape. I wish there were more books like it. Patrick Keiller
A Discerning Confession – Short story, Honest Ulsterman
Metalanliguistica – The Periodical #19
