Product Description

David Gaffney's compact, surreal tales are filled with poignancy and wit. Each story goes off like a tiny depth charge in the mind, leaving you with the trace memory of some new urban myth - comic, absurd and disturbingly true.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105516 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Review
Funny, pointed, and sometimes even disturbing, Gaffney's stories deserve to be read. -- Jim Burns Ambit This book will knock you out. Packed with emotion, annoyance, and social science fiction, it's a testament to imagination and the skill of illustrating it. -- Harlan Levey Modart Magazine David Gaffney is an evolution, a moment in time to be lavished with a literary eye, to be goggled with a mind broad and open enough to look and look anew. Each snippet disturbingly captures everyday life in superbly unique fashion. What a stunning collection. -- Eugen M. Bacon TCM Gaffney has produced the kind of book that makes you wish you spent more time locked in your imagination and less time dismissing irreverent thoughts. -- Lianne Steinberg The Big Issue Almost all the 58 stories in David Gaffney's collection are shorter than this review. Reality becomes dislocated and strange; words and phrases acquire a compelling importance ... One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others. -- Nicholas Clee The Guardian Exceptional and well deserving of the hardcover slapped around them...witty, clever and poignant Gaffney's micro fictions work as funny routines, moving insights and illuminating character sketches, often all at the same time. -- Nicholas Royle Time Out Sawn-Off Tales is an original collection, one that bravely attempts to present modern life in the way that we ourselves experience it -- as a series small, occasionally meaningless snapshots, which build to create a rich complexity. -- Lucy Wood Transition Tradition

The Guardian, December 2, 2006
sad, funny fables recalling evanescent moments of connection and
happiness. 150 words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than some novels

About the Author
David Gaffney was born in West Cumbria, studied in Birmingham and now lives in Manchester. He has worked as an English teacher, a film studies lecturer, a holiday camp entertainer, a medical records clerk, a pub pianist, a debt counsellor in Moss Side, a legal consultant in Liverpool, and now works for a shadowy government organisation. His stories have been published in Ambit, The Illustrated Ape, and The Mix.

Customer Reviews

A PURDY GOOD DOUBLE-BARREL SUCCESS
This book is a trailblazer, surely a one-off, something truly unique. Just 116 pages long, containing as many as 58 (yes, 58) short stories in all, none of which is longer than 300 words or so (some are even shorter), it is nonetheless a masterpiece. I was going to say "a masterpiece of its kind" except that this book has no kith or kin. And that's a lie. Because there are created things it reminds me of - it recalls for me the pithiness and truth of Japanese haiku perhaps, but not prose. And yet, as prose,it is totally satisfying. Yet weird.

Imagine, if you will, that Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (and his other New Yorkers) refuse to remain silent and speak up for a change - and speak in English accents (for God's sake!)and ship out of New York to make landfall in English places. And then imagine, too, that Ray Bradbury is commissioned to write the script with his sci-fi head in gear.

Well, that's David Gaffney and that's SAWN-OFF TALES.

It's odd-ball, it's cranky; it's whimsical and inventive and frightening. It's appalling and enthralling too. It's hilariously funny. It's wonderful gear, a really refreshing change: it's fiction as fiction should be - heading out into the great creative unknown, and devil take the hindmost. And truth to tell, I know far more Christmas stockings that would cheerfully gobble this book up in preference to the latest Dean Koontz or John Grisham.

Beautiful Stories
These beautiful stories crafted in so few words reflect the unique writing skills of this author.Revealing, hilarious and entertaining, they add so much to the rich genre of short stories and to the other collections like Usurper and Other Stories, A twist in the Tale, Anton Chekov's, other short stories that have made my day. I will always watch out for more David Gaffney stories.

A spoonful weighs a ton
Gaffney's stories get under your skin, up your nose and, like literary ferrets, down your trousers. The plots are uncanny, often surreal; a man falls out with his barber over a pricing policy, another has a thing for female shoplifters, a station announcer inspires love in her listeners, and a competition to win a private concert by the Sugar Babes goes disastrously wrong. In dozens of scenes involving hundreds of characters, Gaffney in his deader than deadpan way, weaves a complex picture from joy and darkness in equal parts. They will have you laughing like at a Tommy Cooper video though you know that there's something hideous gnawing at the door to get in.