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Barcelona Plates
Paperback in very good condition. Signed by author on title page. Photos on request. HCW
215 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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248 people want to read
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Alexei Sayle
35 books70 followersAlexei Sayle is an English stand-up comedian, actor, author and former recording artist, and was a central figure in the British alternative comedy movement in the 1980s.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
November 17, 2023
Published in 2000, this is a short story collection from British comedian Alexei Sayle. I picked this up as I recall Alexei Sayle from his terrible music and appearance as landlord, Jerzei Balowski (amongst other family members) in The Young Ones.
I had flicked though it in the second hand book shop, but it was a few dollars and I had nothing to lose except perhaps the couple of hours to read it. I was surprised when I scanned through the reviews, as it gets a healthy 3.81 stars on GR, and the first ten reviews are 4,4,4,4,4,3,3,5,3,5... and not really a negative comment.
The stories are all really character studies - each story revolving around a single character (usually somewhat flawed) and always with a twist at the end. Mostly set in Britain, but a few overseas jaunts as part of the stories, to Haiti, Papua New Guinea, and the first was set mostly in Spain.
I would be lying if I said I got a lot out of them - mostly they were not really even funny. Some of the twists were sharp, but to be fair, few were predictable (to me). I just didn't get much from it, and I would struggle to recommend it to anyone but an Alexei Sayle fan. That said, tidy copy going cheap...
2 stars
I had flicked though it in the second hand book shop, but it was a few dollars and I had nothing to lose except perhaps the couple of hours to read it. I was surprised when I scanned through the reviews, as it gets a healthy 3.81 stars on GR, and the first ten reviews are 4,4,4,4,4,3,3,5,3,5... and not really a negative comment.
The stories are all really character studies - each story revolving around a single character (usually somewhat flawed) and always with a twist at the end. Mostly set in Britain, but a few overseas jaunts as part of the stories, to Haiti, Papua New Guinea, and the first was set mostly in Spain.
I would be lying if I said I got a lot out of them - mostly they were not really even funny. Some of the twists were sharp, but to be fair, few were predictable (to me). I just didn't get much from it, and I would struggle to recommend it to anyone but an Alexei Sayle fan. That said, tidy copy going cheap...
2 stars
August 6, 2014
Ooft. I snorted on the train today. A minging, wet, summer-cold-cum-post-smoking-phlegm, snort. On a totally packed commuter train. If a book can get a soggy snort-giggle out of you then it must have something going for it. In the reading of this book I did a lot of laughing. It's wicked in the Roald Dahl dark short story kind of way rather than the Harry Potter wears a V-neck sort of way. You can see the beginnings of loads of current comedy in it. Bit Black Mirror-y. Some of it is just plain grim and angry but some of it is absolutely cracking.
'Nic and Tob' is massively relevant to my life right now in Edinburgh in August as I pass walls and walls of white, male comedians, their faces blown up to the size of my body:
'In the same way that it takes five pay clerks, engineers and cooks to put one infantryman in the front line, so it takes a monstrous regiment of drivers, agents, lawyers and PAs to get one comedian to the battlefront of comedy, each of them submerging their ego, giving a piece of it to the star they service so that they grow huge and glow like the sun.'
'Nic and Tob' is massively relevant to my life right now in Edinburgh in August as I pass walls and walls of white, male comedians, their faces blown up to the size of my body:
'In the same way that it takes five pay clerks, engineers and cooks to put one infantryman in the front line, so it takes a monstrous regiment of drivers, agents, lawyers and PAs to get one comedian to the battlefront of comedy, each of them submerging their ego, giving a piece of it to the star they service so that they grow huge and glow like the sun.'
December 16, 2012
Sure to make you laugh
This is a collection of short stories, all of which have either a sinister or an amusing twist in the tail. For some, the twist is both sinister and amusing. The stories demonstrate a great deal imagination and variety. If you want to read yet another version of how Princess Diana died, or how an old soldier could get a deathly kick out of his twilight years, just pick up this book and have a read.
I can’t think of any of my friends to whom I would not recommend this delightful little book.
This is a collection of short stories, all of which have either a sinister or an amusing twist in the tail. For some, the twist is both sinister and amusing. The stories demonstrate a great deal imagination and variety. If you want to read yet another version of how Princess Diana died, or how an old soldier could get a deathly kick out of his twilight years, just pick up this book and have a read.
I can’t think of any of my friends to whom I would not recommend this delightful little book.
September 6, 2016
Not sure why, but I enjoyed this book much more on a second reading than I did first time round. Alexei Sayle has a great way of ramming something completely unexpected into his stories, and not just at the end of them. His writing is funny but also very sharp and critical - he perfectly skewers the hypocrisy of the family in the final story, who blame the victim for her own misfortune.
Being a stand-up comedian himself, he is well qualified to make this observation about them in the story titled Nic and Tob:
"Comedians are skittish creatures at the best of times, the mink of the showbusiness world - nice coats but snickering and sniffing the air, chittering and weaving sinuously through the undergrowth, biting those that try to pet them and wiping out any rival wildlife that comes their way."
Being a stand-up comedian himself, he is well qualified to make this observation about them in the story titled Nic and Tob:
"Comedians are skittish creatures at the best of times, the mink of the showbusiness world - nice coats but snickering and sniffing the air, chittering and weaving sinuously through the undergrowth, biting those that try to pet them and wiping out any rival wildlife that comes their way."
October 3, 2023
3.5 rounded up to 4
"Barnaby's girlfriend thought the funniest thing in the world was people being killed while they were on holiday."
From this very first line, I was hooked by Alexei Sayle's offbeat sense of humor; a successful mix of the absurd and the macabre that he wielded to great effect when putting together this collection of snapshots of the underbelly of society.
We run the gamut in terms of protagonists: first person, third person, men, women, old, middle-aged, likeable, deplorable, pathetic, sympathetic, all riding life's roller coaster, but all malcontent in some way, all searching for something. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't, sometimes they get more than what they bargained for.
The back of the book promises 'a septuagenarian contract killer, a chronic hypochondriac, two zombie-creating comedians...' -- all we're missing is a partridge in a pear tree. But although these ideas sound cartoonish, Sayle manages to imbue (most of) them with pulsing humanity so that you really understand why and how these people come to be the way that they are.
Some of the stories are action-packed and punchy, but I liked the stories that lingered better, though they too came with some kind of bonkers twist.
In particular, I really enjoyed:
1. 'Back in Ten Minutes' in which a woman goes to retrieve her interview suit from a dry cleaner’s only to find the owner has closed the shop permanently overnight.'
2. 'You're Only Middle Aged Once', the story of a hypochondriac who makes it big as a columnist after crafting himself into a chronically ill man suffering from various maladies. The ending to this story was near perfect pitch.
3. 'Big-Headed Cartoon Animal' is the most surrealist of all the stories, and without giving away too much, I'll just say that it's about a couple who go to a Disney Park and one of them has a very strange experience involving a character actor of Goofy and one of the trash cans at the park.
4. 'Locked Out' lands at the other end of the spectrum and is more 'no plot, just vibes.' Very eery and cerebral, it's the story of a woman who has locked herself out of her house and has to wait for her husband to get home from work to get let in. The entire thing takes place in her car while she waits.
If you have a dark, absurdist sense of humor, there's definitely one or more stories in this collection for you, and you probably won't hate any of them, though you'll like some more than others.
The Times is quoted on the cover as calling it "arch, desiccated and menacing." I get what they were saying, but although there were moments where I could feel Sayle giving himself a little tap on the side of the nose, I wouldn't principally describe 'Barcelona Plates' that way. Dry in that British sort of way, yes, menacing, a bit, but I never felt like I was being preached at or talked down to, more so like Sayle and I were in on the joke together.
I had just two quibbles overall, and these speak to me specifically as a reader, so if they don't apply to you, pay them no mind.
Firstly, this is a very British collection written in a very British voice, meaning that Sayle is constantly name-dropping streets and boroughs with the casual assumption that the reader knows what he's talking about and has a map of London imprinted on the backs of their eyelids. I do not, and so I'd end of skimming entire paragraphs of him as he gave these incredibly specific, triangulated descriptions of where the story was located, or where a character was going or coming from.
Secondly, although the overall sense I get from the types of stories these are and the types of absurdism employed is that 'Barcelona Plates' is coming from a very left-wing place, there was one area where I could sense an unexamined bias of Sayle's peeking through. He has a consistent habit of using 'black' and 'brown' as shorthand descriptors for degeneracy, especially when setting a scene. For instance, and this was hardly the only time, but in one story a woman is attacked by three men who are given no other description than 'swarthy.' He also uses people of color as background figures to add what I can only describe as 'spice' or 'flavor' to a scene.
The same could be said, frankly, of how he employs 'fat' as shorthand to dehumanizing effect.
These habits felt very odd considering how purposefully he employed them at other times. He'll throw in lines or subplots about the intersections of race and class in some stories, but then do the thing I described in many of the others in ways that feel unconscious.
And it's not as though he's unaware of how bias shapes reality; the entire story 'The Minister For Death' is about how the seventy-two year old protagonist is able to be such a successful assassin because old people are ignored and therefore rendered invisible in a society that only values the personhood of the young.
It's strange.
I'm tempted to think these choices were meant to be reflections of the mindset of the characters he wrote, but if that's the case, he didn't add enough nuance or commentary or internal criticism to make sense of what the point was. Sure, lots of people have these racial and body-type biases and unconscious, baked-in sensibilities, but these were fictional characters, and by just presenting them that way uncritically would only serve to re-enforce those biases in readers who also think that way, not get them to look inward at why they themselves have these feelings about people of color or fat people.
I dunno, maybe I'm being nit-picky, but if you go out of your way to try to present a particular perspective, namely one spotlighting otherized or otherwise overlooked groups of people and on the other hand critique how absurdly out of touch the bourgeoisie is, it seems like a bizarre mis-step.
That being said, even though this pricked at me during and after my reading of 'Barcelona Plates', make no mistake: I really liked this collection overall, and the hits were huge hits.
"Barnaby's girlfriend thought the funniest thing in the world was people being killed while they were on holiday."
From this very first line, I was hooked by Alexei Sayle's offbeat sense of humor; a successful mix of the absurd and the macabre that he wielded to great effect when putting together this collection of snapshots of the underbelly of society.
We run the gamut in terms of protagonists: first person, third person, men, women, old, middle-aged, likeable, deplorable, pathetic, sympathetic, all riding life's roller coaster, but all malcontent in some way, all searching for something. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't, sometimes they get more than what they bargained for.
The back of the book promises 'a septuagenarian contract killer, a chronic hypochondriac, two zombie-creating comedians...' -- all we're missing is a partridge in a pear tree. But although these ideas sound cartoonish, Sayle manages to imbue (most of) them with pulsing humanity so that you really understand why and how these people come to be the way that they are.
Some of the stories are action-packed and punchy, but I liked the stories that lingered better, though they too came with some kind of bonkers twist.
In particular, I really enjoyed:
1. 'Back in Ten Minutes' in which a woman goes to retrieve her interview suit from a dry cleaner’s only to find the owner has closed the shop permanently overnight.'
2. 'You're Only Middle Aged Once', the story of a hypochondriac who makes it big as a columnist after crafting himself into a chronically ill man suffering from various maladies. The ending to this story was near perfect pitch.
3. 'Big-Headed Cartoon Animal' is the most surrealist of all the stories, and without giving away too much, I'll just say that it's about a couple who go to a Disney Park and one of them has a very strange experience involving a character actor of Goofy and one of the trash cans at the park.
4. 'Locked Out' lands at the other end of the spectrum and is more 'no plot, just vibes.' Very eery and cerebral, it's the story of a woman who has locked herself out of her house and has to wait for her husband to get home from work to get let in. The entire thing takes place in her car while she waits.
If you have a dark, absurdist sense of humor, there's definitely one or more stories in this collection for you, and you probably won't hate any of them, though you'll like some more than others.
The Times is quoted on the cover as calling it "arch, desiccated and menacing." I get what they were saying, but although there were moments where I could feel Sayle giving himself a little tap on the side of the nose, I wouldn't principally describe 'Barcelona Plates' that way. Dry in that British sort of way, yes, menacing, a bit, but I never felt like I was being preached at or talked down to, more so like Sayle and I were in on the joke together.
I had just two quibbles overall, and these speak to me specifically as a reader, so if they don't apply to you, pay them no mind.
Firstly, this is a very British collection written in a very British voice, meaning that Sayle is constantly name-dropping streets and boroughs with the casual assumption that the reader knows what he's talking about and has a map of London imprinted on the backs of their eyelids. I do not, and so I'd end of skimming entire paragraphs of him as he gave these incredibly specific, triangulated descriptions of where the story was located, or where a character was going or coming from.
Secondly, although the overall sense I get from the types of stories these are and the types of absurdism employed is that 'Barcelona Plates' is coming from a very left-wing place, there was one area where I could sense an unexamined bias of Sayle's peeking through. He has a consistent habit of using 'black' and 'brown' as shorthand descriptors for degeneracy, especially when setting a scene. For instance, and this was hardly the only time, but in one story a woman is attacked by three men who are given no other description than 'swarthy.' He also uses people of color as background figures to add what I can only describe as 'spice' or 'flavor' to a scene.
The same could be said, frankly, of how he employs 'fat' as shorthand to dehumanizing effect.
These habits felt very odd considering how purposefully he employed them at other times. He'll throw in lines or subplots about the intersections of race and class in some stories, but then do the thing I described in many of the others in ways that feel unconscious.
And it's not as though he's unaware of how bias shapes reality; the entire story 'The Minister For Death' is about how the seventy-two year old protagonist is able to be such a successful assassin because old people are ignored and therefore rendered invisible in a society that only values the personhood of the young.
It's strange.
I'm tempted to think these choices were meant to be reflections of the mindset of the characters he wrote, but if that's the case, he didn't add enough nuance or commentary or internal criticism to make sense of what the point was. Sure, lots of people have these racial and body-type biases and unconscious, baked-in sensibilities, but these were fictional characters, and by just presenting them that way uncritically would only serve to re-enforce those biases in readers who also think that way, not get them to look inward at why they themselves have these feelings about people of color or fat people.
I dunno, maybe I'm being nit-picky, but if you go out of your way to try to present a particular perspective, namely one spotlighting otherized or otherwise overlooked groups of people and on the other hand critique how absurdly out of touch the bourgeoisie is, it seems like a bizarre mis-step.
That being said, even though this pricked at me during and after my reading of 'Barcelona Plates', make no mistake: I really liked this collection overall, and the hits were huge hits.
March 19, 2021
Alternative comedians tried too hard to distance themselves from main stream. If you didn't find them funny, then you just didn't get it. Short stories, now there's something else to avoid. Why I read this book I have no idea, but so glad I did. Well crafted, serious,scary,gripping and yes occasionally funny. Sorry Alexi, I was wrong
September 2, 2019
First book by Alexei Sayle I have read. The Mish mash of short stories and quirky characters was a nice change although I connected with some stories more than others. Overall I'd definitely read another book by the author, but maybe next time I'll try a novel.
February 5, 2018
This is a qunitessentially ENGLISH collection of stories by funny Alexei Sayle. Some are better than others, all are darkly humorous, if that's not yer thing, don't bother.
September 6, 2024
4.5 stars. I borrowed Barcelona Plates from a friend when I left the book I’d been reading on a train (still hurts), so had no idea what to expect when I dove in. It took me a while to get through the first two chapters, until realisation hit that this was a collection of short stories. I then couldn’t put it down.
The crafty buildups of the characters’ seemingly mundane lives were almost as exciting as the inevitable twists, uncovering awful yet endearing flaws. This book was a comical reminder of our free will. I’m not suggesting you become a hitman or a narcissist to remedy boredom (yet), but I’ll be living life a little more spontaneously after reading this collection.
The crafty buildups of the characters’ seemingly mundane lives were almost as exciting as the inevitable twists, uncovering awful yet endearing flaws. This book was a comical reminder of our free will. I’m not suggesting you become a hitman or a narcissist to remedy boredom (yet), but I’ll be living life a little more spontaneously after reading this collection.
September 23, 2018
It is impossible to dislike Alexei Sayle, whose intelligent and righteous anger with the world percolates into comedy that is as dark as it is absurd. Except that here that formula only sometimes produces actual comedy. Never mind: even the less than funny stories were fun to read. Keep up the good work Mr Sayle, but don't give up your day j... Oh, it is, is it?
June 11, 2022
One of the weirdest books I ever read.
It's not for the faint hearted.
The humour is black, cynical and sadistic at times.
Sometimes stories start quite normal, but suddenly derail and end in a blood thirsty ending.
All in all it was quite a new experience to me, I don't expect to see anything like it soon.
It's not for the faint hearted.
The humour is black, cynical and sadistic at times.
Sometimes stories start quite normal, but suddenly derail and end in a blood thirsty ending.
All in all it was quite a new experience to me, I don't expect to see anything like it soon.
April 21, 2019
Funny, shady, refreshingly Alexi Sayle. Many of these short stories will stay with me and be reread. Great imagination and ideas. Will look for another collection if thre is one.
January 2, 2023
Always end up rating short stories 3 stars because I always end up liking some and not others. Overall enjoyed these and Alexi Sayle's trademark obsurd, hard working class hero storytelling style.
March 12, 2023
Short stories are always a little lost on me! Some were great though.
December 31, 2024
A superb collection of short stories. This a book I've read before - pre-GR account - but it's one of the few that makes me properly laugh out loud. Still hilarious. Still bitingly relevant.
March 24, 2013
One of the other reviewers felt unsure about how this book would be received "over the pond." His suspicion was right on.
I'm an American teaching English in Kuwait (this review was written in 2004). My British flatmate lent me this book. When I read the glowing recommendation from author Douglas Adams on the back, I figured it couldn't miss. Yet I have to admit, though I read it cover to cover, I found very little that really grabbed me.
Having tramped around London and a few other cities in England, I enjoyed the book for its descriptions of places in Britain and it's interpretation and description of things English from a native's point of view. But I got very little out of it aside from that and a few interesting philosophical tidbits sprinkled here and there throughout the book (see the bottom of this review for a quote).
I sort of enjoyed the title story in the way I might enjoy listening to a half-crazy friend tell a story about his loony adventures on holiday, but I found it hard to believe the story would have any wide appeal. I am told that it's Princess Diana in that last scene in the tunnel in Paris, but so what?
I also very much enjoyed Back in Ten Minutes, although I found the ending kind of weak. But he did throw in some amusing details like the magazine pictorial of thirty-five feminist vaginas and the questionnaire entitled "How determined are you?" I also loved the typically British non-complainer who comes to pick up his tuxedo for his wedding only to find that the dry cleaner has abandoned his store without bothering to announce it and simply shrugs it off, saying he can just wear jeans or something.
Douglas Adams reserved particular praise for the story The Last Woman Killed in the War. "Brilliant tragedy and brilliant comedy delivered in one stunning sentence" he says of the end of that story. That really leaves me scratching my head. In fact, I felt that that could have been one of the better stories if he hadn't ruined it with that silly, throwaway ending.
Nic and Tob was kind of amusing but, again, the ending was pretty silly. I did enjoy the following interesting bit of philosophy from that story, though:
"There are few cuisines that are robust enough to travel: Italian, Chinese, French cooking can all be eaten anywhere in the world, can take the substitution of local ingredients and still remain true to themselves; but many others - Austrian, Russian, Spanish for example - simply do not work outside their own borders. There is some connection between the climate and the produce and the way the produce is cooked that breaks down once the cooking goes abroad. The same is true of magic. There are some magics that will work as reliably all over the world as a Zippo lighter - voodoo is not one of them. For voodoo to be consistently effective, it needs to feed on the humid air of the Caribbean, it needs an atmosphere dripping with the quavering thoughts of a million terrified believers, the powders, bones, herbs must soak in the soil where Baron Samedi still watches over the graveyard and the rada drums still echo over the denuded hills."
In closing, I originally checked two stars, but after leafing through the book a bit while putting together this review, I upped that to three stars. Maybe the book wasn't so bad, after all. I would definitely be willing to read something else by the same author in the future.
I suppose my main gripe is that the stories themselves didn't seem, for the most part, to have much in the way of a plot. Still, some of the details and character development combined to make it an interesting look at contemporary England.
I'm an American teaching English in Kuwait (this review was written in 2004). My British flatmate lent me this book. When I read the glowing recommendation from author Douglas Adams on the back, I figured it couldn't miss. Yet I have to admit, though I read it cover to cover, I found very little that really grabbed me.
Having tramped around London and a few other cities in England, I enjoyed the book for its descriptions of places in Britain and it's interpretation and description of things English from a native's point of view. But I got very little out of it aside from that and a few interesting philosophical tidbits sprinkled here and there throughout the book (see the bottom of this review for a quote).
I sort of enjoyed the title story in the way I might enjoy listening to a half-crazy friend tell a story about his loony adventures on holiday, but I found it hard to believe the story would have any wide appeal. I am told that it's Princess Diana in that last scene in the tunnel in Paris, but so what?
I also very much enjoyed Back in Ten Minutes, although I found the ending kind of weak. But he did throw in some amusing details like the magazine pictorial of thirty-five feminist vaginas and the questionnaire entitled "How determined are you?" I also loved the typically British non-complainer who comes to pick up his tuxedo for his wedding only to find that the dry cleaner has abandoned his store without bothering to announce it and simply shrugs it off, saying he can just wear jeans or something.
Douglas Adams reserved particular praise for the story The Last Woman Killed in the War. "Brilliant tragedy and brilliant comedy delivered in one stunning sentence" he says of the end of that story. That really leaves me scratching my head. In fact, I felt that that could have been one of the better stories if he hadn't ruined it with that silly, throwaway ending.
Nic and Tob was kind of amusing but, again, the ending was pretty silly. I did enjoy the following interesting bit of philosophy from that story, though:
"There are few cuisines that are robust enough to travel: Italian, Chinese, French cooking can all be eaten anywhere in the world, can take the substitution of local ingredients and still remain true to themselves; but many others - Austrian, Russian, Spanish for example - simply do not work outside their own borders. There is some connection between the climate and the produce and the way the produce is cooked that breaks down once the cooking goes abroad. The same is true of magic. There are some magics that will work as reliably all over the world as a Zippo lighter - voodoo is not one of them. For voodoo to be consistently effective, it needs to feed on the humid air of the Caribbean, it needs an atmosphere dripping with the quavering thoughts of a million terrified believers, the powders, bones, herbs must soak in the soil where Baron Samedi still watches over the graveyard and the rada drums still echo over the denuded hills."
In closing, I originally checked two stars, but after leafing through the book a bit while putting together this review, I upped that to three stars. Maybe the book wasn't so bad, after all. I would definitely be willing to read something else by the same author in the future.
I suppose my main gripe is that the stories themselves didn't seem, for the most part, to have much in the way of a plot. Still, some of the details and character development combined to make it an interesting look at contemporary England.
October 10, 2024
This is a fantastic set of short stories. Very funny. Perhaps not as well-written as I thought when I read them the first time (I have read this book a few times since then) - for example: sometimes the verbs can't seem to remember which tense they are supposed to be in. But who cares? the stories excite and make me laugh - and that is better than worrying about the past ...or the present (tense).
October 2024:
Almost every week, it seems, there appears on breakfast t.v. some comedian being interviewed. He or she has - surprise, surprise! - written a book which is coming out next month.
Why do comedians feel the need to write books? An author wouldn't want to stand up on stage telling jokes, would they? People would laugh at them.
But they write books: humorous stories, thrillers, children's stories. Bloody children's stories. There is no stopping them.
This book is an exception to that (unspoken) rule. The stories in this book are written by someone who can entertain in a humorous, and some times thoughtful, way.
Turn off your breakfast t.v. programme whenever a comedian appears for interview and read this book instead.
October 2024:
Almost every week, it seems, there appears on breakfast t.v. some comedian being interviewed. He or she has - surprise, surprise! - written a book which is coming out next month.
Why do comedians feel the need to write books? An author wouldn't want to stand up on stage telling jokes, would they? People would laugh at them.
But they write books: humorous stories, thrillers, children's stories. Bloody children's stories. There is no stopping them.
This book is an exception to that (unspoken) rule. The stories in this book are written by someone who can entertain in a humorous, and some times thoughtful, way.
Turn off your breakfast t.v. programme whenever a comedian appears for interview and read this book instead.
August 11, 2011
I was brimming with excitement about reading this one, but you have to read two short stories into the book to be able to gage Sayles depiction of the dissolute and non-plussed and their rise and fall. The namesake Barca Plates was quite flat but I could get the idea. The story of the Liverpool Pensioner cum Chechen Gangster is a superb gem (perhaps reflecting where Alexei commands ultimate writing strength) and Ant and Dec do Voodoo (I don't know it actual name - apologies) is hilarious. There is no template to his comedy but unfortunately you get the gist of his storycraft early on.
October 7, 2021
This is my favourite of Sayles books that I have read. In fact I craved that he returned to the short story format when reading his novels as I feel he has a real talent for short stories. The snapshots he is able to convey are entirely free of the desperate need for plot and character that his novels have and instead can be as eccentric as his comedy. I expect his publisher wanted novels as the short story format doesn't have traction these days in the market, which is a shame as I feel it suits Sayle's talents and grip on the madness of the world.
March 24, 2012
I read this after "The Dog Catcher", and I thought that maybe I had now learnt his "trick" when it comes to writing short stories, so that I would no longer be surprised. But there were some stories which just seemed to come out of nowhere and take my breath away. I finished this book days ago and the last story still haunts me.
April 22, 2012
You will smile, Alexei's communist anti establishment leanings clearly show, whilst of course being firmly in with his Oxbrigde mates. This book is a great introduction to his dark, cynical humour.
I've read evrything he's written, This series of shorts is well worth the money.
My Indie reviews are on my blog.
http://www.jeremypoole.net/blog.html
I've read evrything he's written, This series of shorts is well worth the money.
My Indie reviews are on my blog.
http://www.jeremypoole.net/blog.html
January 15, 2017
This book was given to my ex boyfriend by his Dad with a hearty recommendation. It sat gathering dust for ages until I finally picked it up and couldn't put it down! I love his twisted sense of humour but I am very glad I am not a character in one of his stories!
Kept the book, ditched the boyfriend
Kept the book, ditched the boyfriend
May 10, 2007
Generally preferring nonfiction, I recently re-read this genius collection of short stories and was reminded about how gosh darn magnificent fiction can be sometimes.
December 12, 2007
flippin veh funny!
October 28, 2008
Fall about funny! A great read.
December 13, 2010
A good collection of short stories, some more interesting than others.
March 22, 2011
Short stories: Some surreal, some harrowing, some hilarious, some odd until the very last sentence.
Read
July 31, 2011Funny, very dark though
August 8, 2011
Some great short stories, comic and emotional
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews