Music for the Off-Key: Twelve Macabre Short Stories

by Courttia Newland

Drawing inspiration from everything from traditional horror movies to the sophistication of contemporary Japanese short-story styles, the literary and the popular merge seamlessly in this uniquely black British mix. This collection meticulously and insightfully observes West London's black communities―from patterns of speech, fashions, and pleasures to the pressures of racism and exclusion they seek to escape. Delighting in the dark, the grotesque, and the uncanny, these entertaining, genre-smashing stories provocatively reject the implicitly territorial limits placed on black British writing, and are followed by an afterword in which the author writes of his frustration with the narrow limits imposed on black British fiction by mainstream publishing expectations.

Genres: Short Stories

240 pages, Paperback

First published July 24, 2006

About the author

Courttia Newland is a British writer of Jamaican and Bajan heritage.

Reviews

[Ian Russell · Rating 1 out of 5]

'Fraid I had to bail out of this book part way through chapter one. I didn't like that thing he did with the dialogue: use the words they use by all means but don't give me no phonetics, guy!

Also it was like ''on loan'' and the library, right, said they needed it back, like today! whatever. I may get it out again if there's nothing else catching my eye.

[Ray Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

great book by courttia, pushing the boundaries as usual