Cart
Free Shipping in Australia
Proud to be B-Corp

The Half-Life of Songs David Gaffney

The Half-Life of Songs By David Gaffney

The Half-Life of Songs by David Gaffney


$16.99
Condition - Like New
Only 1 left

Summary

Succinct in length and vast in imagination, Gaffney's micro stories are bizarre and witty slices of condensed reality. Frequently hilarious and often poignant, they leave an after taste that is resonant, dark and clingy. They sometimes seem to glow from the inside with their own awful secrets.

The Half-Life of Songs Summary

The Half-Life of Songs by David Gaffney

This is David Gaffney's latest collection of micro stories. We see a world where thinking is illegal, belly dancers' blood is used to fertilize tomato plants, pensioners in leather trousers dance to two-step garage, and an architect steals crested newts and hides them in his bath.

The stories are often beyond odd yet always ordinary, a warped backward-talking world of Lynchian surreality, allowing an emotional insight into the rich interior lives of social outsiders, the broken and the easily-breakable, perpetually on the fringes of our world.

The Half-Life of Songs Reviews

About Sawn Off Tales

Witty, clever, poignant, Gaffney's micro fictions work as funny routines, moving insights and illuminating character sketches.

-- Time Out

About Sawn off Tales:

Utterly brilliant. Hilariously demented and wonderfully succinct. David Gaffney's Sawn-Off Tales are little McNuggets of pure gold.

-- Graham Rawle

About Sawn Off Tales:

Sad, funny fables recalling evanescent moments of connection and happiness. One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.

-- Nicholas Clee * The Guardian *

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. I wish Gaffney was allowed 15 minutes of time with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to make his vision come to life.

-- Lianne Steinbery * The Big Issue *

About Aromabingo:

A triumph of the blurring of literary boundaries with a dose of unabashed comic bravura and honouring British writing with the awkward, self-conscious, yet jagged aplomb it so deservedly needs.

* The Short Review *

About Aromabingo:

Offbeat, unsettling and yet frequently hilarious, Aromabingo is a solid step on from the accomplished Sawn Off Tales and proof that David Gaffney is one of those names to watch.

* Bookmunch *

About Never Never:

Gaffney's strength is creating strong characters, and this debut brims with them. With a ruthless eye and pitch-black humour, Gaffney explores a consumer culture in which exploiting the welfare system is both a necessity and an addiction, and in which hypocrisy is endemic

* The Observer *

Loaded with potent charges, insidious and cumulative in their effects. In Gaffney's fiction thoughts take physical form, and the material world has a surreal vitality ... The stories are sometimes haunting, and sometimes comic. The Half-life is an appropriate metaphor for the lingering effect they have on the reader.

-- Nicholas Clee * Times Literary Supplement *

About David Gaffney

David Gaffney lives in Manchester. He is the author of several books including Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), Never Never (2008), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). He has written articles for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect, and his new novel, All The Places I've Ever Lived, is due out in spring 2017. See www.davidgaffney.org.

Table of Contents

  • Half open
  • A certain type of man
  • Talking about Emmy-Lou
  • Everything's gone turquoise
  • The history brush
  • Having it like Pontefract
  • Half aware
  • Towns in France exactly like this
  • Junctions one to four were never built
  • Buildings crying out
  • Everlast
  • The forcing of air
  • Live feed
  • Half There :
  • The Three Daves
  • Are Friends Electric?
  • You Would Have
  • I Liked Everything
  • Half Here:
  • Wooden Animals
  • Remaking the Moon
  • Do the Voice
  • Pathfinders
  • Emergency Kisses
  • Celia's Mum's Rat
  • Half Gone:
  • We are the Real Time Experiment
  • Delivered by Sharks
  • Previously Loved
  • The Ones we Left
  • Shaky Ron and the Chewing Gum Robots
  • Half Awake:
  • Double Digging
  • Away Day
  • Gelling
  • Candy Girl
  • One Thing Deeply
  • Don't Thank Me Thank the Moon's Gravitational Pull
  • Half Alone:
  • How the Taste Gets In
  • Desire lLnes
  • To Cause Amusement
  • Spoilt Victorian Child
  • Heart Keeps Holding On
  • Domino Bones
  • Half Loved:
  • Some World, Somewhere
  • The Next Best Thing
  • Portraits of Insane Women
  • Monkeys in lLove
  • Is Your Thought Really Necessary?
  • Half Whole:
  • The Valued Coach Driver and his Spiral Wife
  • Music Like ours Never Dies
  • The Buddy Holly Electrician
  • Keep Them on, Love
  • What You See is There
  • Coned
  • Not Static
  • Half Closed:
  • The Only Man with Fire
  • People who Don't Belong
  • So Much Noise
  • The Half-Life of Songs
  • Come and Play in the Milky Night

Additional information

GOR012295803
9781844717750
1844717755
The Half-Life of Songs by David Gaffney
Used - Like New
Paperback
Salt Publishing
20101101
208
Long-listed for Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story 2011 (UK)
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
The book has been read, but looks new. The book cover has no visible wear, and the dust jacket is included if applicable. No missing or damaged pages, no tears, possible very minimal creasing, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins

Customer Reviews - The Half-Life of Songs