Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111717 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Time Out, 19 December 2006
Witty, clever, poignant Gaffney's micro fictions work as funny
routines, moving insights and illuminating character sketches

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

Synopsis
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.

Customer Reviews

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.

Slow motion robot dancing, acupuncture in a blur
Lean, sinewy, rugged, economic to the point of angularity, Gaffney's stories compress emotion like a recycler jumping on cardboard boxes. He describes quiet people with impossibly rich interior lives; a zoo-worker who invites the homeless to live in the animal enclosures, a girlfriend leaves because of robot dancing, waiters make fun of a diner's t shirt whilst he's on a first date, a Chorlton therapist combines dance with acupuncture and it ends in bloodshed. Written in slow motion and read in a blur, these 58 stories strive towards a single active quality, an essence, and somehow, they always get there

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.