Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair

by Larry Harrison, Mary Banks, Heikki Hietala

Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair

Welcome to Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, the first sampler from some of the Year Zerø Writers. Year Zerø Writers is a collective of authors who believe literature should be a direct conversation between readers and writers.

Here you will find glimpses of our work. Many of us will be publishing novels from 1 September 2009. Details of all individual novels, our authors, and the aims of Year Zerø Writers, can be found on our website Please feel free to contact us, or to get in touch with our authors directly.

We hope you enjoy reading our work as much as we enjoy writing it for you, and look forward to a long and fruitful dialogue.

Cover Art by Larry Harrison.

88 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Larry Harrison started life as a cowman and yak keeper for the Tibetan Buddhist community at Karma Kagyu Samye Ling, in Dumfriesshire. After working his way up to the post of assistant dairyman on a commercial Ayrshire herd, he left Scotland in 1975 to work with disadvantaged children at London's Clapham Junction.

Larry became surprisingly good at persuading children not to stand on the railway tracks at Earlsfield Station. And he was able to talk them down from rooftops in Battersea, without them bombarding passers-by with slates. To this day, Larry is relieved that he was able to negotiate the release of everyone held hostage by Barry in the school unit. The Parks Department should not have left an axe unattended within sight of the building, and had Barry not been so amenable, the outcome could have been a good deal worse. (Thanks, Baz. What fun we had! Sorry to hear you were done last year for kidnapping that Assistant Governor on D Wing.)

During Larry's subsequent career, as a university researcher on alcohol and drug problems, he wrote Tobacco Battered, a BBC Radio 4 feature, and over fifty journal articles, academic books and book chapters. He was appointed Reader in Addiction Studies at Hull University, long a centre of excellence in problem drinking, before retiring to the East Yorkshire countryside to make cider and write fiction. Glimpses of a Floating World, published in 2009 through Lulu.com, is his first novel."

Reviews

[Moxie Mezcal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Year Zero is a collective of independent writers who pool their resources to cross-promote each others' work, and since they started up they have been literally everywhere on the internet. Which is a great idea, but what really matters is how good - and I mean, really fucking good - their work is.

Each writer had their own unique thematic focus and style, but they all share a tendency toward gritty, hard-edged urban realism. Theirs are stories about artists, junkies, seekers, and other imperfect souls who stay out too late, wake up with morning-after regrets, dig themselves in too deep - in short, people like the rest of us.

[Lenox Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

year zero, independent writers 2.0, the short stories that will make you view writing in a new light.

[Rebecca]

Friend of mine wrote this, I came upon it by accident in a Google search.