The Doll's Alphabet
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“There are shades of David Lynch, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter in this collection of feminist allegories and surreal skits” (The Guardian). Dolls, mirrors, tinned foods, malfunctioning bodies—the seemingly banal quickly turns unsettling in this debut story collection. A woman laments having to send her children to daycare before turning into a wolf and eating them both in “The Mouse Queen.” “Waxy” explores a dystopian world where failure to register for exams can result in blackmail. And in “Unstitching,” a woman unstitches her own body to reveal her new form, which resembles a sewing machine. With the thirteen stories collected in The Doll’s Alphabet, Camilla Grudova proves herself to be “a canny collage artist with an eye for the comically macabre.” While Grudova draws “her images from Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics . . . her ironies and insights about the inequalities in relationships between men and women feel startlingly current (Publishers Weekly).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Women become wolves, men are born spiders, Gothic ornaments conquer an apartment building, and corpses complain in Grudova's smart, haunting debut collection. Set in worlds that overlap with ours characters listen to Tchaikovsky, watch Pinocchio, and travel to Europe these stories nevertheless render familiar tropes deeply strange. In the dystopia of "Rhinoceros," trains don't run, food is scarce, but a young couple survives by selling drawings of animals they've never seen to a mysterious man in a gray top hat. The society of "Waxy" sanctions an extreme form of couplehood: women must support their men by working in hazardous factories, where they are often maimed, while men study for exams and visit caf s. Many objects and images recur throughout the collection: women remove their skin to reveal their "true" bodies, which resemble sewing machines, in "Unstitching," and an eight-legged dandy falls in love with a sewing machine in "Notes from a Spider," hiring seamstresses to keep the machine running at any cost, even their own lives. A kidnapped mermaid skulks around the house in "The Mermaid," while a ship's wooden mermaid figurehead gives birth to a little cherub statue in "The Sad Tale of the Sconce." A canny collage artist with an eye for the comically macabre, Grudova scavenges her images from Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics. Against this background, her ironies and insights about the inequalities in relationships between men and women feel startlingly current.
