An account of the decline of the Great Auk, according to one who saw it / Jessie Greengrass.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Greengrass, Jessie, 1982- author.

Standardized Title:

Short stories. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Short stories.

Genre:

Short stories.

Fiction.

Physical Description:

v ii, 181 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

London : JM Originals, 2015.

Summary:

The twelve stories in this startling collection range over centuries and across the world. There are stories about those who are lonely, or estranged, or out of time. There are hauntings, both literal and metaphorical; and acts of cruelty and neglect but also of penance. Some stories concern themselves with the present, and the mundane circumstances in which people find themselves: a woman who feels stuck in her life imagines herself in different jobs - as a lighthouse keeper in Wales, or as a guard against polar bears in a research station in the Arctic. Some stories concern themselves with the past: a sixteenth-century alchemist and doctor, whose arrogance blinds him to people's dissatisfaction with their lives until he experiences it himself. Finally, in the title story, a sailor gives his account - violent, occasionally funny and certainly tragic - of the decline of the Great Auk.

Contents:

An account of the decline of the Great Auk, according to one who saw it

On time travel

All other other jobs

Theophrastus and the dancing plague

Winter, 2058

Some kind of safety

The lonesome southern trials of Knut the whaler

The politics of minor reistance

Three thousand, nine hundred and forty-five miles

Dolphin

The comfort of the dead

Scropton, Sudbury, Marchington, Uttoxeter.

ISBN:

9781473610859

1473610850

OCLC:

915913556