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Red Girl Rat Boy
Flood Cynthia
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Description for Red Girl Rat Boy
Paperback. A new collection from a noted feminist author and winner of the prestigious Journey Prize for short fiction. Num Pages: 192 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 216 x 140 x 13. Weight in Grams: 170.
A Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year A Globe & Mail Best Short Fiction Title A National Post Best Short Fiction Title A January Magazine Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2014 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize Longlisted for the 2014 Frank O'Connor Award "Complicated, passionate, genuine."--Chatelaine Women. Young women, old women. The hair-obsessed, the politically driven, the sure-footed, the bony-butted, the awkward and compulsive and alone. Sleep-deprived and testy. Exhausted and accepting. Among the innumerable wives, husbands, sisters, and in-laws vexed by short temper and insecurity throughout this short story collection, Cynthia Flood's protagonists ... Read morestand out as citizens of a reality that the rest of the world will only partially understand. New from the Journey Prize-winning author, Red Girl Rat Boy is a collection of astonishing range and assured technique, whose voices--gothic, peculiar, domestic, and strange--remain as passionate and complex as ever. Praise for Red Girl Rat Boy "Revenge and politics season this potent and passionate collection of stories. Flood excavates indelible histories that haunt even those who've shaken the dust of the past." --Aritha van Herk, author of Judith "Flood's eye is unflinching, her language energetic and precise, her vision bracing, passionate and entirely lacking in sentimentality."--Nancy Richler, author of The Imposter Bride "The notary in 'Dirty Work' has 'retired from witnessing how rough human existence is.' Fortunately for us, Cynthia Flood has not ...these stories prove her to be among our great North American fiction writers."--Betsy Warland, author of Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing "Raw energy is Cynthia Flood's territory. This is a superb collection."--Laurie Lewis, author of Little Comrades "Cynthia Flood is full of surprises. If there's one thing that characterizes her elegant, crystal-sharp short stories, it's that element of surprise ...they reward the attentive reader with surprise and delight"--Dave Margoshes, author of A Book of Great Worth Show Less
Product Details
Place of Publication
Emeryville, Canada
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
About Flood Cynthia
Cynthia Flood's stories have won numerous awards, including The Journey Prize and a National Magazine award, and have been widely anthologized. Her novel Making A Stone Of The Heart was nominated for the City of Vancouver Book Prize in 2002. She is the author of the acclaimed short story collections The Animals in Their Elements (1987) and My Father Took ... Read moreA Cake To France (1992). She lives on Vancouver's East side. Show Less
Reviews for Red Girl Rat Boy
"In Red Girl Rat Boy Cynthia Flood has pared her style down to a clipped staccato that is at first jarring, then mesmerizing. How does she scrape the narrative so close to the bone, yet still manage to emotionally engage the reader? Because she's a master, carefully maximizing the potential of each word ... poetry."
Caroline Adderson, The Globe & Mail ... Read more"Flood is a highly accomplished stylist, whose technique is tightly calibrated and precise ... Anything superfluous is ruthlessly pared away ... The stories in Red Girl Rat Boy are brief, but dense, requiring concentration and attention ... [yet are] as emotionally engaging as any flat-out storyteller."
The National Post "Flood challenges, enlightens, disturbs ... a stunning fifth book."
The Vancouver Sun "As we have come to expect, Flood's stories reward attentive reading. Realism is the dominant technique, but there are also quirks that bend the reader's ear and excite. Carol Shields used to talk about female storytelling that avoided the "classic" duality of climax and release. Flood's stories are Shields-type stories: multi-orgasmic. Ahem."
Quill & Quire "The Journey Prize-winning author packs a lot [of] power into 11 taut stories that celebrate and challenge women of all types. Flood is unflinching, but her readers might not be so brave. The author is honest to the point of occasional emotional and unsentimental brutality. This is amazing stuff."
January Magazine "With the agility of an acrobat, Flood navigates shifts and turns within time, often lifetimes, while employing a free indirect style that catapults the reader from a character's most immediate experience to retrospective narration and then back again ... These stories are told in a voice that navigates like an underground stream through the deepest channels of the psyche. These stories are felt in the marrow."
The Coastal Spectator "Diverse and peculiar, elliptical and compressed, with no linkage between them other than the spare, sure skill of the writer ... Flood is a master of doing more with less. There are no wasted words, yet each story has a huge expanse and a high ceiling ... Flood, in scant and careful images, places us in stories that require us to see and to think about perspective, about where we are situated, what it is we see, and what to make of it."
The Malahat Review "A unique breed of confident, highly stylized writing ... Creative writing courses would benefit from studying why she does what she does ... Flood's stories are also commendable for covering much emotional ground and character history in very little space."
The Telegraph-Journal "Do not search for a grand overarching theme in this collection of short stories by the prize-winning Canadian author. Flood freely experiments with a style she describes as " elliptical, compressed, imagistic" and features protagonists who are flawed, varied, and
enticingly
only partially relatable."
Toronto Review of Books "A strong collection from a Journey Prize winner who knows how short stories ought to work."
Salty Ink "Flood's narratives know no bounds ... her stories break through barriers, surprise at turns ... Flood herself is the hunter shooting right between the eyes."
Pickle Me This "Compulsively readable."
CultMontreal Praise for The English Stories "Cynthia Flood's complex and intricate collection of linked stories takes a deep pleasure in words and language. And the characters stay with you long after you put down the book.
Globe & Mail "Taken together, the stories ultimately achieve a brooding resonance that captures the literal and spiritual dampness of a provincial scene that all but died out with the last remnants of the British empire."
Quill & Quire "Vancouver writer Cynthia Flood has won a slew of prizes for her fiction, and her latest book, a collection of linked short stories called The English Stories, shows why the accolades are so well deserved. Flood is a thoughtful writer whose richly dense prose opens up worlds to explore."
Vancouver Sun "Like metaphors, myths are nearly everywhere. Red Girl Rat Boy tells us that metaphor and myth are not separate from the so-called real world, but that they help to define its politics. And while critics may treat the words and actions of politicians with skepticism, Flood treats most of her characters non-judgmentally
a gesture of respect for them and for her readers."
Literary Review of Canada Praise for Cynthia Flood Winner of The Journey Prize, The Western Magazines Gold Award for Fiction, and a National Magazine Gold Award for Fiction "In Cynthia Flood's remarkable first novel, there's no tidy shuttling between present and past, no chronological storytelling... The complex narrative demands that you pay attention, and it works; like the lives of its characters, this novel is complicated, passionate, and genuine."
Chatelaine "Linguistic dexterity is Flood's primary strength." Sam Knowles, Canadian Literature Show Less
