The Doll's Alphabet

(Paperback)

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Description

Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies - many images recur in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark. In 'Unstitching', a feminist revolution takes place. In 'Waxy', a factory worker fights to keep hold of her Man in a society where it is frowned upon to be Manless. In 'Agata's Machine', two schoolgirls conjure a Pierrot and an angel in a dank attic room. In 'Notes from a Spider', a half-man, half-spider finds love in a great European city.

By constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has come up with a method for storytelling that is highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting.

'Marvellous. Grudova understands that the best writing has to pull off the hardest aesthetic trick - it has to be both memorable and fleeting.' - Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

Reviews

'That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams.'- Nick Lezard, Guardian

'If fairytales could dream, this nightmarish collection is what you might end up with. Grudova's closest living counterpart could be Ben Marcus, with whom she shares a heavy debt to Kafka ... But the atmosphere of her fantastical, semi-dystopian settings is so unique and persuasive that the day after finishing the book, I awoke from a dream to realize that it had taken place in Grudova's universe. ... The author's surreal humour, often delivered via deadpan dream logic, recalls the startling short stories of Leonora Carrington. Both Carrington and Grudova excel at a certain well-placed, pedestrian literalism that works deliciously against the magical elements in their fiction.' - Claire Lowdon, Times Literary Supplement

'[O]ne of the most purely original collections I've read, filled with strange and squirmy imagery, monsters and sewing machines and things with many, many legs.' - Julia Armfield, author of Salt Slow

Author Bio

Camilla Grudova is a writer living in Edinburgh. She holds a degree in Art History and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta.