Tous les livres de Eley Williams
The Liar's Dictionary explores themes of trust and creativity, naming the unnameable, and celebrates the rigidity, fragility and absurdity of language. It is an exhilarating debut novel from a formidably brilliant young writer.
This debut collection from Eley Williams centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way in which one's thoughts - absurd, encompassing, oblique - may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm.
Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. This is writing that centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to 'own' their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds.
With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose, the inability to communicate exactly what we mean dominates this bold new collection from one of Britain's unique and most original new writers.
Granta Best Young British novelist and author of Attrib. and other stories, Eley Williams returns with a subversive and essential collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient – from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. Whether jostling for attention or ducking to evade it, here characters seek connections not only with each other but also with versions of themselves.
In ‘Cuvier’s Feather’, a courtroom sketch artist delights in committing portraits of their lover to paper but their need to capture likenesses forever is revealed to have darker, more complex intentions. At the centre of ‘Wilgefortis’, a child’s schoolyard crush on a saint marks a confrontation with the reality of a teenage body in flux. An editor of canned laughter loses their confidence and seeks divine intervention; an essayist annotates their thoughts on Keats by way of internet-gleaned sex tips.
Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good hums with fossicking language and ingenious experiments in form and considers notions of playfulness, authenticity and care as it holds relationships to their sweet misunderstandings, soured reflections, queer wish fulfilments and shared, held breaths.
