
The Doll's Alphabet
Camilla Grudova(Author)
Coffee House Press
Published on 30. November 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
192 pages
978-1-56689-490-6 (ISBN)
Description
Surreal, ambitious, and exquisitely conceived, these are stories in the tradition of Angela Carter, Franz Kafka, and Margaret Atwood.
Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies-by constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has built a universe that's highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting. The stories in The Doll's Alphabet are by turns childlike and naive, grotesque and very dark: the marriage of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.
Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies-by constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has built a universe that's highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting. The stories in The Doll's Alphabet are by turns childlike and naive, grotesque and very dark: the marriage of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.
Reviews / Votes
Praise for The Doll's AlphabetFinalist for the Shirley Jackson Award in the Single-Author Collection category
Finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award
"The world [The Doll's Alphabet] inhabits-droll, inexplicable and even beautiful in its slovenly fashion-is unlike any other I've encountered." -The Wall Street Journal
"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." -The Guardian
"Grudova's method of storytelling is highly imaginative and incredibly ambitious." -Chicago Review of Books
"The Doll's Alphabet is a dark, yet naive, body of work dripping with eccentricity and weirdness." -CBC
"Grudova does mermaids and magic, but she also does moldy, dingy, scratch-and-sniff interiors that reek of cabbage and old shoes. . . . Grudova's descriptions are crooked and revelatory." -Harper's Magazine
"Grudova is a master of world-building with an incredible command of language." -The Herald
"A singular collection from a unique talent, stories with the force of dreams, a reading experience from which you may never awaken." -The National Post
"If fairytales could dream, this nightmarish collection is what you might end up with. . . . Grudova very efficiently spins us into her weird web." -The Times Literary Supplement
"The stories included in [Grudova's] debut collection [The] Doll's Alphabet are at once macabre and wondrous. . . . Grudova's imagination is among the most potent to emerge in literature in recent memory." -Entropy
"Just when we feel we have escaped the familiar for the fantastical, an event or a detail pulls us back. The resulting picture is one of a society determined by structures as opaque and incredulous as our own." -TANK
"[Grudova's] writing is haunting and humorous, and the attention to gender dynamics adds a layer of truth to these dark tales." -NewPages
"These stories draw on images and myths you know-mermaids, werewolves, children's dolls-but they've been reinvented with darker, dreamier twists." -MPR
"Camilla Grudova's debut short story collection, splits open a dollhouse of domestic life and allows us to examine the magical dystopian interior." -Arkansas International
"Camilla Grudova's collection will appeal to anyone who loves weirdness with a message." -Bustle
"Grudova's beguiling collection of short stories-filled with mermaids and werewolves-announces the arrival of a major new voice in Canadian fiction." -Globe and Mail
"This doll's eye view is a total delight and surveys a world awash with shadowy wit and exquisite collisions of beauty and the grotesque." -Helen Oyeyemi, author of Boy, Snow, Bird
"Down to its most particular details, The Doll's Alphabet creates an individual world-a landscape I have never encountered before, which now feels like it was waiting to be captured, and waiting to captivate, all along." -Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?
"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
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
MN
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 208 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
203 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-56689-490-6 (9781566894906)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Camilla Grudova lives in Toronto. She holds a degree in art history and German from McGill University, Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in the White Review and Granta.