Attrib.

(Paperback)

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A GRANTA BEST YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST 2023

The real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing MAX PORTER

'She has arrived in a class of her own' SARAH PERRY

'Funny, playful and utterly bravura' MELISSA HARRISON
The debut story collection from Eley Williams centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way in which one's thoughts absurd, encompassing, oblique may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm. Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books.

This is writing that centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to 'own' their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds. With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose, the inability to communicate exactly what we mean dominates this bold collection from one of Britain's unique and most original writers.

Reviews

A writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

'It's exhilarating to dive into the associative rush of Williams's writing' Vanity Fair

'It is impossible not to identify with Williams's candid observations of the quirks and quandaries of emotional life Times Literary Supplement

'No fiction writer was more exciting on sentence level The White Review

'There's no one working in the UK quite like her' Joanna Walsh

'An emotionally delicate and tenderly introspective collection' New Statesman

'Funny, playful and utterly bravura' Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

'It's just the real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing this book. I love it in a way I usually reserve for people' Max Porter, author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers

'It proved you can generate acrobatic, edge-of-your-seat fiction, from little more than random arcana' The Telegraph

'Attrib. And Other Stories cornered the market in cerebral playfulness' Guardian

I came late to Eley Williams and am happy to have found her. Hearing her read her short story Smote aloud recently blew me away Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under

'Think William Gass, Lydia Davis or Anne Carson, and you won't be too wrong' Michael Hoffmann, London Review of Books

'Williams' writerly roots in poetry and poetic prose shine throughout this stunning collection of almost intimidatingly intelligent and creative work' Mslexia

An absolute must-read for anyone remotely interested in the contemporary short story The London Magazine

Wondrous things, shots of linguistic pleasure that take moments of everyday life and fashion something marvellous from them Times Literary Supplement

Author Bio

Eley Williams' collection of fiction Attrib. and Other Stories (2017) was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her novel The Liar's Dictionary won a 2021 Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and listed as a Guardian Book of the Year. Her writing is published in journals and anthologies including Modern Queer Poets, The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story edited by Philip Hensher, and Liberating the Canon edited by Isabel Waidner, with stories and serialised fiction also commissioned by Radio 4. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.