A Gypsy's Book of Revelations

by Cécile Barlier

A Gypsy’s Book of Revelation is a collection of stories with an astonishing range of styles and subject matters. A woman visits her cremation from inside the body of her dead self, a competitive couple trains as free-divers, a mother leaves her son behind on top of a mountain, a very pregnant woman experiences a peculiar relationship with a these stories are full of surprising experimentation that strikes a deeply compelling balance between the real and the bizarre. Embodying unusual premises and worlds, these stories are also fearlessly nontraditional in their structure and approach. These voices haunt, tease, and dare while never providing fully fledged answers. Each story is its own unique thing, a small but profound nod to the human condition.

216 pages, Paperback

Published April 6, 2021

Reviews

[Sasha]

I haven't read this book. I just wonder why in 2020 we're publishing books with slurs in the title?

[Olga Zilberbourg]

A collection of wonderfully inventive stories that get at the strangeness of the human experience by changing what's possible with the story structure. One of the pieces that struck me in particular, was a story called Wednesday of the Japanese Wave. In this story, the narrative is broken into several sections, and the titles of the sections are themselves a narrative: they are a string of sentences connected to one another. The story is about a relationship between a granddaughter and a grandmother, as I understand it. It’s a daring technique, and it’s very rewarding for the reader who gets to reconstruct the puzzle.

[Kelly]

Not really what I was expecting, which isn't bad necessarily. The choppy writing style was off putting. The way the writer played with living and dead characters, sometimes the narrator was dead, sometimes not and sometimes, such as with the last story in this volume of short stories, you are not sure. The short stories didn't really connect to each other.

[Francescajemm]

Wonderful! Compelling, marvelously imaginative, and so well written.

[Adam Bricker]

A collection of short stories...some of which are heartfelt and some more stream of consciousness and some beautifully descriptive.

[Jennifer Pullen]

An unforgettable short story collection that swerves between disturbing and tender, a while remaining stylistically daring.