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Bait and Switch: & Other Stories
Eight stories of love, friendship, and indifference. Ashley Sievwright is the author of The Shallow End , and Walter 'An impressively fresh voice in Australian fiction' ... 'evocative prose and cynical humour are Sievwight's strengths' ... 'droll observations about life, presented at a gentle pace' ... 'Well that was unexpected. Not sure if I loved it or hated it' ... 'witty and easy to read' ... Sievwright is a great wordsmith' ... 'gently poetic' ...
206 pages, Paperback
Published May 18, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 18, 2022
Interesting set of short stories, some enjoyable, some not so.
March 6, 2023
There is something... weirdly familiar about these stories. Not in the sense that I've ever read any of them before. More in the sense that these are stories where you get to the end of one and think... "yeah, story checks out".
They make sense.
They're also, for the most part, the kind of cozy, low-stakes story I've been enjoying of late. You could very easily chalk them up under the heading "nothing much really happens", which isn't true. Things happen, often very strange things, sometimes very eventful things, other times mostly uneventful things, but in all cases, it's small, personal, mundane things. They do get slightly weirder as the book goes along though.
They're all, at their heart, queer stories. Queer stories about queer people, where the fact that they're queer is actually the least interesting thing about them. Or at least the least interesting in the world of the story.
I think the titular Bait and Switch is probably my favourite, because I had no idea where it was going. It's also very much the weirdest of the stories.
With the final story The Mummy being my second favourite (also, bonus points to Sievwright for taking the existing Sirius Building from Sydney, moving it across to the other side of the harbour and calling it the Bellatrix Building... I see what you did there).
I enjoyed these stories very, very much, I have to say.
They make sense.
They're also, for the most part, the kind of cozy, low-stakes story I've been enjoying of late. You could very easily chalk them up under the heading "nothing much really happens", which isn't true. Things happen, often very strange things, sometimes very eventful things, other times mostly uneventful things, but in all cases, it's small, personal, mundane things. They do get slightly weirder as the book goes along though.
They're all, at their heart, queer stories. Queer stories about queer people, where the fact that they're queer is actually the least interesting thing about them. Or at least the least interesting in the world of the story.
I think the titular Bait and Switch is probably my favourite, because I had no idea where it was going. It's also very much the weirdest of the stories.
With the final story The Mummy being my second favourite (also, bonus points to Sievwright for taking the existing Sirius Building from Sydney, moving it across to the other side of the harbour and calling it the Bellatrix Building... I see what you did there).
I enjoyed these stories very, very much, I have to say.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews