What do you think?
Rate this book
Dot Dash
Prepare to enter a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems, where elephants squat in living rooms, plastic ducks fall from the skies and even the rabbits can’t be trusted. The fifty-eight stories in Jonathan Pinnock’s Scott Prize-winning collection Dot Dash show a vivid yet disciplined imagination at work.
These stories, many of which have individually won prizes, are populated by a rich variety of characters, including a tightrope-walking couple with marital issues, a graffiti artist with an agenda and an interviewee who’s about to find out some awkward truths about himself. Very few of them turn out to be completely innocent, and none of them remains unaffected by the experience.
Jonathan Pinnock’s unashamedly entertaining fictions explore what happens when the macabre and the absurd crash headlong into everyday life. As writer Tania Hershman says, he ‘isn’t content to just pull back the curtain, but sets fire to it and chuckles as it blazes’. With this incendiary first collection, he invites readers to pull up a chair and watch the flames rise.
These stories, many of which have individually won prizes, are populated by a rich variety of characters, including a tightrope-walking couple with marital issues, a graffiti artist with an agenda and an interviewee who’s about to find out some awkward truths about himself. Very few of them turn out to be completely innocent, and none of them remains unaffected by the experience.
Jonathan Pinnock’s unashamedly entertaining fictions explore what happens when the macabre and the absurd crash headlong into everyday life. As writer Tania Hershman says, he ‘isn’t content to just pull back the curtain, but sets fire to it and chuckles as it blazes’. With this incendiary first collection, he invites readers to pull up a chair and watch the flames rise.
- GenresShort Stories
183 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2012
3 people are currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Pinnock
32 books24 followersJoin my mailing list to get an exclusive free ebook: https://mailchi.mp/eefe1cc4aa2e/youve...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 16, 2018
I really enjoyed this collection, especially the long-short format. My favourite stories were 'Going Back to Cairo' and 'Farewell Symphony'.
July 25, 2013
I bought this collection after reading, "The Amazing Arnolfini and His Wife", which I loved. It contains "dashes" - short stories, and "dots" - micro-stories. Jonathan Pinnock sets up fantastic but not always comfortable scenarios, which reveal fears and flaws. His sci-fi, horror and humorous patchwork is both entertaining and accessible. My favourites included the very moving, "Return to Cairo", the humorous, "Canine Mathematics" and the telling, "A Plague of Yellow Plastic Ducks". Recommended.
August 6, 2019
An interesting mix of flash and short fiction. Great span of imagination, from tightrope walkers to guerrilla artists to carnivorous space pilots.
April 3, 2022
A fun collection of stories. Highly recommend if you're a fan of flash fiction.
April 8, 2013
After ploughing through a string of four over-long and largely disappointing novels, Dot Dash turned out to be just what I needed. It's quite a slim book, weighing in at a shade under 200 pages, but it contains 58 stories. As implied by the title, these are arranged in sequence, with "dots" (very short stories, many of them small enough to fit the 140-character limit of a tweet) alternating with "dashes" (more traditionally sized short stories). The "dashes" tend not to extend over more than four or five pages, so - if you so desired - you could gulp down the entire selection in a relatively short space of time.
I've enjoyed many of Jonathan's stories online in recent years, and so it wasn't a surprise to find myself enjoying this book too. There were some old favourites - such as rZr and Napoleon, The Amazing Arnolfini and His Wife, and Advice re Elephants - but the majority of the stories were new to me. I have to say I got more from the dashes than from the dots, on the whole - microfiction is interesting (and I've tried it myself with varying results), but even when it's done particularly well it often seems more like a demonstration of the writer's skill and/or imagination than a genuine story with real depth. That said, there are some impressive examples throughout the book, and having them interspersed with the longer pieces produced an interesting effect - whenever I got to the end of a story, it proved almost impossible not to read the microstory that followed it, and more often than not I would then find myself reading the next story as well.
Reading this collection, I found myself thinking of Adam Marek's 'Instruction Manual for Swallowing', as there is the same sense here that you can never predict where the author is going from one story to another, and the only answer is to give in and follow wherever he leads. Neither author pays any attention to the invisible boundaries between genres, and the resulting collection is much richer, more varied, and interesting than the 'variations on a theme' you get with some anthologies. However, where I found Marek's stories had a frustrating tendency to peter out towards the end, Pinnock keeps a tighter hand on the reins and ensures the endings do justice to the leaps of imagination that get the story off the ground in the first place. There is plenty of humour, in both dots and dashes, but Jonathan's prose is equally sure-footed when tackling poignancy (see Return to Cairo or The Guitarist's Inheritance) or horror (the unsettling Nature's Banquet, for instance). Many of the stories occupy a curious middle-ground, funny-but-disturbing, sad-but-hopeful, stubbornly resistant to classification.
When you get to the end (and particularly if you're a writer), it's worth reading the Acknowledgements section, where the publishing and/or prizewinning history of the stories is revealed. Almost all have earned their stripes in competitions, anthologies, magazines, and online publications, and it's easy to imagine Dot Dash becoming a set text for any writer looking to address the tricky question of exactly how you go about getting a judge or editor to notice your story among everybody else's. Jonathan Pinnock's answer appears to be simple: Write - write whatever and however you like, about anything that interests you. Don't worry about being one type of writer or another, don't let genre be a constraint, and - most importantly - don't forget to leave the reader grinning like a lunatic.
I've enjoyed many of Jonathan's stories online in recent years, and so it wasn't a surprise to find myself enjoying this book too. There were some old favourites - such as rZr and Napoleon, The Amazing Arnolfini and His Wife, and Advice re Elephants - but the majority of the stories were new to me. I have to say I got more from the dashes than from the dots, on the whole - microfiction is interesting (and I've tried it myself with varying results), but even when it's done particularly well it often seems more like a demonstration of the writer's skill and/or imagination than a genuine story with real depth. That said, there are some impressive examples throughout the book, and having them interspersed with the longer pieces produced an interesting effect - whenever I got to the end of a story, it proved almost impossible not to read the microstory that followed it, and more often than not I would then find myself reading the next story as well.
Reading this collection, I found myself thinking of Adam Marek's 'Instruction Manual for Swallowing', as there is the same sense here that you can never predict where the author is going from one story to another, and the only answer is to give in and follow wherever he leads. Neither author pays any attention to the invisible boundaries between genres, and the resulting collection is much richer, more varied, and interesting than the 'variations on a theme' you get with some anthologies. However, where I found Marek's stories had a frustrating tendency to peter out towards the end, Pinnock keeps a tighter hand on the reins and ensures the endings do justice to the leaps of imagination that get the story off the ground in the first place. There is plenty of humour, in both dots and dashes, but Jonathan's prose is equally sure-footed when tackling poignancy (see Return to Cairo or The Guitarist's Inheritance) or horror (the unsettling Nature's Banquet, for instance). Many of the stories occupy a curious middle-ground, funny-but-disturbing, sad-but-hopeful, stubbornly resistant to classification.
When you get to the end (and particularly if you're a writer), it's worth reading the Acknowledgements section, where the publishing and/or prizewinning history of the stories is revealed. Almost all have earned their stripes in competitions, anthologies, magazines, and online publications, and it's easy to imagine Dot Dash becoming a set text for any writer looking to address the tricky question of exactly how you go about getting a judge or editor to notice your story among everybody else's. Jonathan Pinnock's answer appears to be simple: Write - write whatever and however you like, about anything that interests you. Don't worry about being one type of writer or another, don't let genre be a constraint, and - most importantly - don't forget to leave the reader grinning like a lunatic.
February 11, 2013
From guerrilla artists taking revenge on a corporate world to a tribal culture formed around rubber ducks. A love story told in few sentences; day one, week one, month one and year one. The simple, consideration of taking an old relative to a place of joy, if imaginary. A future where the food chain has been compromised and meat is a luxury few can afford. Mathematical murders. All these things are more are told through this collection of short stories from Jonathan Pinnock.
The travel guide was accurate, if a tad unhelpful. “For more information about Hell,” it said, “see below.”
These stories are alternating dots and dashes. The dots are only a few sentences at most, whilst the dashes are more consistent with an expected short story length. But those dots made me laugh! So did some of the dashes too. It is a little book that brought a smile to my face repeatedly and was a real joy to read.
At first glance, the stories are a bit weird. I like weird but Dot, Dash goes beyond weird for weird’s sake. Many have a twist and those twists will make you think. Whilst the tableaus may go beyond the believable, very human characteristics are explored, pushing some of the characters to re-evaluate what makes them who they are. Some of the stories could be considered scary; such as Convalescence which was one of my favourites. A man is recovering from a medical procedure and is attending his psyche evaluation. He is having some side-affects…which turn out to reveal a terrifying truth.
It’s one of the best short story collections I’ve read and one I think I will go back to repeatedly. I do find it hard to review short stories without giving too much away, so I’ll just encourage you to give this one a go.
The travel guide was accurate, if a tad unhelpful. “For more information about Hell,” it said, “see below.”
These stories are alternating dots and dashes. The dots are only a few sentences at most, whilst the dashes are more consistent with an expected short story length. But those dots made me laugh! So did some of the dashes too. It is a little book that brought a smile to my face repeatedly and was a real joy to read.
At first glance, the stories are a bit weird. I like weird but Dot, Dash goes beyond weird for weird’s sake. Many have a twist and those twists will make you think. Whilst the tableaus may go beyond the believable, very human characteristics are explored, pushing some of the characters to re-evaluate what makes them who they are. Some of the stories could be considered scary; such as Convalescence which was one of my favourites. A man is recovering from a medical procedure and is attending his psyche evaluation. He is having some side-affects…which turn out to reveal a terrifying truth.
It’s one of the best short story collections I’ve read and one I think I will go back to repeatedly. I do find it hard to review short stories without giving too much away, so I’ll just encourage you to give this one a go.
April 29, 2013
This is a fine collection of short stories and well-balanced. I do have some reservations however. With one or two exceptions there weren’t many stories here that I felt I wanted to reread and relish. They weren’t hard reads—and by that I mean they were so well-written that I slipped seamlessly from one sentence to the next and never once had to reread a paragraph to see if I’d understood him right the first time (with the sole exception of the story written in reverse) although there was a ‘dot’ that I stared at for longer than I really ought to have before I could see where he was going with it; my wife when I showed her also took an extra few seconds before she got it. Who, these days, has time to read a book more than once anyway? Because of the ease of reading it’s tempting to treat these works as lighter than what they are though. Granted there are some that are deliberately light and fluffy (like the appropriately-named ‘Hidden Shallows’) and, really, what’s the point rereading them once you’ve got the joke? The book’s not full of them so enjoy them for what they are. The bottom line is that this is an enjoyable read from beginning to end. This would have been perfect bus reading for me because having to get off and go to work would’ve stopped me devouring the book in one or two sessions; I actually managed to spread it over four sittings.
You can read my full review on my blog here.
You can read my full review on my blog here.
May 10, 2013
Ranging from remote tribes in South America who measure success and happiness in yellow rubber ducks (A Plague of Yellow Plastic Ducks) to boiling frogs (Frogs) to the every day, Dot Dash has something for everyone. Bordering on the weird, and always ever so slightly abnormal, Pinnock makes you think whilst reading his stories, and for quite some time after as well.
One of my favourites was The Last Words of Emanuel Prettyjohn, the story about a mute boy. There are a lot of different characters in it, all with distinct voices: "He were a funny wee babby, that one." (Alison Fish, midwife), "Oh, I remember him all right. Bloody nuisance." (Harry Philpott, schoolteacher), "We all thought he was a bit of a freak, to be honest." (Jack Wilson, classmate). It was also very funny in parts and made me laugh out loud.
Another favourite was Proper Job, a micro fiction piece about shoes which made me chuckle (and sing a bad rendition of the Spandau Ballet song in my head on the way home from work).
Proper Job
"Get a proper job," said old man Blahnick. "Shoes will never make you rich." But young Manolo knew better. "Gold!" he thought. "Always believe in your sole."
Highly recommended for anyone who likes to read short, shorter and the very shortest of stories, preferably with a tendency towards the slightly peculiar.
One of my favourites was The Last Words of Emanuel Prettyjohn, the story about a mute boy. There are a lot of different characters in it, all with distinct voices: "He were a funny wee babby, that one." (Alison Fish, midwife), "Oh, I remember him all right. Bloody nuisance." (Harry Philpott, schoolteacher), "We all thought he was a bit of a freak, to be honest." (Jack Wilson, classmate). It was also very funny in parts and made me laugh out loud.
Another favourite was Proper Job, a micro fiction piece about shoes which made me chuckle (and sing a bad rendition of the Spandau Ballet song in my head on the way home from work).
Proper Job
"Get a proper job," said old man Blahnick. "Shoes will never make you rich." But young Manolo knew better. "Gold!" he thought. "Always believe in your sole."
Highly recommended for anyone who likes to read short, shorter and the very shortest of stories, preferably with a tendency towards the slightly peculiar.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 13, 2013
I raced through this collection of short and flash stories. My first intention was to read a story a day, but once I started I couldn't stop. Wickedly funny at times and yet also written with pathos and humanity. Jonathan Pinnock's imagination must be a wonderful place to live - he would certainly be on my guest list for a dinner party!
August 18, 2013
Really good, full of very short and very very short stories - some are better than others, but every one is worth a read, and the best of them are superb!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews