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 Various
Temptations
-
- by William Sansom
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- With an Introduction by Mark
Valentine
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- 'For
William Sansom, every aspect of the commonplace could be
seen from a changed and utterly strange perspective. The
Surrealists had got it right, . . . that is how the world
is. People and objects interested him equally, and in his
work their qualities are often intermingled, so that the
inanimate has a sinister sentience and the individual
seems transfixed by a nightmarish and inescapable
fate.’—So Mark Valentine introduces us to the
twenty-five stories of Various
Temptations, representing the best of William
Sansom’s fantastic and macabre short fiction.
-
- Sansom
enjoyed a brief period of acclaim in the 1940s and 50s,
when the fresh originality of his stories and his supple,
experimental style earned him a place in the leading
British literary periodicals. Sansom’s writing has been
compared with that of Franz Kafka: he was able to
transform the intensity of his wartime firefighting
experiences in the London Blitz into a tense, peculiarly
charged and intimate literature where the everyday
becomes symbolic and is imbued with sinister portent. Yet
there is also a life-affirming energy and diversity in
Sansom’s work. The celebrated story ‘Fireman Flower’
unfolds the feverish, over-heated mental state of the
fireman protagonist in an unusually expressive way. In
‘The Equilibriad’ a man wakes to find himself aslant, his
body able only to move at an angle to the rest of the
world. ‘The Long Sheet’ enjoys the mythic quality of an
Eastern morality fable, ‘A Saving Grace’ is an
exquisitely poetic, calmly understated ghost story, and
in the macabre ‘The Little Room’ a nun awaits her
horrifyingly Gothic fate.
- A writer
who ‘constantly surprises and stimulates our own
imaginings’, William Sansom gave the macabre story an
avant-garde sophistication and a sharper edge.
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- Various Temptations is a sewn
hardback book of 350+xv pages. Limited to 350
copies.
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- Price
£35.00/$70 inc. p&p.
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- ISBN
9781872621739
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- Reviews:
- "Warmly recommended" - The
Independent, 24/11/06
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- ". . . there are some undeniably brilliant
pieces here." - Douglas Campbell, All
Hallows
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- "Correctly titled, Various
Temptations, a collection of 25 stories introduced
by Mark Valentine, offers a rare opportunity for readers
to acquaint themselves with an author whose fictions are
timely and timeless." - Hellnotes
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- "A wealth of fictional explorations that
peer deep into the nightmarish wonders hiding just within
the surface of the everyday." - FEO
AMANTE.COM.
Page updated 23rd March 2008
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