First published 1992
The stories in this collection refuse to behave like ordinary fiction. Bowering creates narrators who question their own reliability, characters who seem aware they exist in stories, and plots that fold back on themselves. A writer sits down to craft a tale only to find his characters rebelling against his intentions. A woman discovers that the events of her life follow suspiciously neat narrative patterns. The boundaries between author, narrator, and reader dissolve as Bowering explores what happens when stories become self-conscious about being stories. Each piece examines the relationship between lived experience and the stories we tell about that experience. The collection asks whether any story can be truly reliable when filtered through memory, language, and the human need to impose meaning on chaos. These are stories about storytelling itself, where the act of narration becomes as important as what gets narrated.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: intimate, self-aware, thought-provoking
Tropes: metafiction, unreliable-narrator
Period: 20th-Century, 21st-Century
313 pages · Paperback · Talonbooks Ltd