ABOUT FACE

(Paperback)

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Description

Cecile Rossant's About Face is an eclectic jumble of short fiction, ranging in length from three and a half lines to 23 pages, sucks you in under the pretence of being short stories and before you know it, lo-and-behold, you realize you're reading a poem. It may not always look like a poem, or even sound like one, but Rossant's writing is

Reviews

"... forget your pre-conceptions about narrative and just roll with the beauty of the language. A rewarding, at times delectable, dream-like experience which stays with you long after you think you've woken up."
- Damien McGuinness

"Cecile Rossant s fiction follows the economical arc of dreams, of dream logic and imagery. Many of these stories are as brief as lyric poems. Others (notably The Belly of a Bird, a lovingly painstaking account of cooking and sensuality) offer the pleasures of accreted description and twisting plot. Humor and grief thread their way through the work in unexpected ways. But in all of Rossant's stories the reader can t help but admire the intensity, the physicality, the directness, the quirkiness of vision. There is nothing easily conventional here, and because there isn't, we must look and think and feel."
-Mary Jo Salter

These stories are about as indecent and shocking as your dreams: Death, sex, violence and illicit yearnings ... Even more surprising is that all this is recounted in a tone often verging on the hilarious. I didn't know it was even possible to pour scorn on the sex industry and be witty at the same time. After reading "The Tuna Club" and "Appropriate Actions" I now see it is. In other stories, such as "She Twists to Position Her Face", Rossant demon-
strates such empathy for the fat and the unattractive that by the end you will never make fun of the audience of Jerry Springer again. And in the excellent "Horizontal Damage" you are brought closer to the Holocaust in six pages than Stephen Spielberg managed in one-and-a-half hours. "
- Damien McGuinness

Author Bio

A student of biology, sculpture and architecture, Cecile Rossant moved from New York to Tokyo, and finally Berlin, working as an architect in all three cities. She is the author of the collection of short fiction, About Face, (Red Hen Press 2004). Her stories have also appeared in Salt Hill, Exberliner, Bordercrossings and the anthology of contemporary fiction, The Crucifix is Down (Red Hen Press 2005).