Curious and unflinching...deftly executed and cringingly funny'Guardian'Truly excellent'Brandon Taylor,author of Real Life,shortlisted for the 2020 Booker PrizeWhether working in food service or in high-end retail,lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director,or sharing a flat in the city or a holiday rental in Mallorca,the protagonists of the ten stories comprising Paul Dalla Rosa's debut collection navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion,ambition and aimlessness,the curated profile and the unreliable body.By turns unsparing and tender,Dalla Rosa explores our lives in late-stage Capitalism,where globalisation and its false promises of connectivity leave us further alienated and disenfranchised. Like the legendary Lucia Berlin and his contemporary Ottessa Moshfegh,Dalla Rosa is a masterful observer-and hilarious eviscerator-of our ugly,beautiful attempts at finding meaning in an ugly,beautiful world.'Voyeuristically addictive,funny,and deceptively simple'Halle Butler,author of The New Me
MEDIA REVIEWS
Publisher: Profile Books LtdISBN: 9781800810136Number of pages: 240Weight: 200 gDimensions: 196 x 128 x 22 mmEdition: Main
MEDIA REVIEWS
With caustic wit,Dalla Rosa performs a kind of surgery on his characters,splitting them wide open to reveal something exciting and vivid,ugly and depravedTruly excellent...read it,both for Paul's sharp,dry wit and also the taut beauty of his linesPitch perfect,with undercurrents of sorrow and angstDarkly funny...Bitingly ironic and immensely originalThese are bold,acerbic stories that draw out the surreality of our disconnected,often brutal world.I love these voyeuristically addictive,funny,and deceptively simple stories. Paul Dalla Rosa has perfectly articulated the bizarreness of human isolation and human behaviour.A precise and perfect depiction of a particularly current brand of emptiness and aloneness...hilarious,brutal,warm and tenderEngrossing,gleefully unsettling,curious but mercifully never whimsical,this is an eminently readable collectionThe contemporary urgency of his stories is intoxicating....This is such an exciting collection - writing this good is thrilling,exhilaratingHilarious and heartbreaking...It's deliciously deadpan,often absurd,and painfully alive.Paul Dalla Rosa's writing is beautiful in its simplicity,awe-inspiring in its assessment of contemporary culture,and hilarious when you least expect it. Each story in An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life contains its own stunning world and its own cast of unforgettable characters playing out scenes that only Dalla Rosa could write. This book is a knockout.Striking,singularA blisteringly brilliant and deliciously unsettling short-story collectionWhat is remarkable about this collection is that Dalla Rosa harnesses the unique strengths of the short story form to achieve a myriad portrait of this particular crossroads in contemporary history,especially as it impinges on young gay people.Collected in An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life,the short stories of Melbourne writer Paul Dalla Rosa use minimalism to elevate the state of in-betweenness to an exercise of constraint. His stories eschew spectacle...but their resonance is created by more subtle means,by the promises that these lonely and angst-ridden characters are learning about themselves,learning (through their failures) how to exist in a world with the odds stacked against them
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