"Tania
Hershman makes immaculate tiny stories
that punch ten times heavier than their weight,
as if a 500 page novel
had been ground up and distilled into capsule
form. They are so biting
and so perfect they seem to hang in the air for
moments after you’ve
finished reading them, like little prayers.
Emotionally wrenching,
funny, quirky, and full of condensed wisdom,
insight and love,
Hershman’s short short stories are whirring,
ticking word machines
waiting to explode inside you."
David
Gaffney, author
of Sawn-Off
Tales, Aromabingo, and
The
Half Life of Songs
“Unique
voices of
mystery, love and loss in stories thrumming with
big ideas. Elegant
and powerful.”
Paddy
O'Reilly,
author, The
End
of
The
World,
The
Factor,
The
Fine
Colour
of
Rust
"The writer Alasdair Gray once described himself
as “a maker of
imagined objects.” It strikes me that
Tania Hershman needs a more
artful descriptor than ‘writer,’ too: brilliant;
mysterious; not of
this earth—I adore her and I adore this book."
Marjorie
Celona, author, Y
|
Published:
May 3rd
2012
Paperback,
96
pages ISBN:
1906477604
ebook ASIN:
B008CS57X2
"Tania Hershman writes with such passion and
playfulness, the pain and
the fear and the hope woven through her
stories hits all the harder.
The result is beautiful, funny and quietly
devastating."
Nicola
Walker, actress (Spooks,
Inside Men )
A
scintillating collection of 56 short
fictions by one of the genre’s
most daring exponents, whose economy
of words cloaks her subtlety and
power. Tania Hershman’s work is
powerful, spiky and off-beat but
with a
distinct warmth and affection for
her subjects.
My Mother Was an
Upright Piano: Fictions
builds on the strengths of Tania
Hershman's first
collection of short stories
The White
Road and
Other Stories,
which
was commended by the judges of the
2009 Orange Award for New Writers.
Hershman's fiction is inspiring,
thought-provoking and witty. She
is able to create characters with
distinct voices and explore deep and
sometimes disturbing relationships
in just a few paragraphs of prose.
Her writing style has a lyrical
quality and often the meter of her
work
brings added resonance to her
themes.
Read
more about very short stories,
often called flash fiction
>>>
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"Funny,
fresh,
lyrical. These stories are like colorful
glass lozenges
holding the substance of our everyday lives,
sparkled up by the unusual
and wondrous."
Aimee
Bender, author of Willful Creatures and
The Particular
Sadness of Lemon Cake
“This
collection is two rich catalogs interleaved.
In the first, the
stories succeed precisely where their own
characters fail: these deft
fictions are full of (and about) the humor and
heartbreak made manifest
when communication fails. In the second,
meaning somehow gets through,
albeit not through words, but through physics,
say, or music, say, or
love. Together the two halves lay bare a world
where speaking clearly
is nothing short of heroic.”
Roy Kesey, author of Pacazo,
All Over, and
Nothing in the
World
"Tania Hershman's fictions are incredible
things which both challenge
and explore the wider picture
whilst honing in on the
minutae of everyday life. Bold,
assured and poetic My
Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions confirms
Hershman's standing as
an important contemporary voice."
Lee
Rourke, author, The
Canal, Everyday,
A
Brief History of Fables
(ed)
"Simply superb, and anything but simple, these
fictions peel back the
layers we build up over our lives with the
sharpest of scalpels: the
eye of that rare creature - a real writer."
Vanessa
Gebbie,
author, Words
From a
Glass Bubble, Storm Warning,
The Coward's
Tale
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