A diverse, daring volume, Desperate Remedies brings together dazzling short fictions by Adam Elston, Shaun Levin, Mark Saba, M L Stedman, Paul Blaney and Guy Ware, edited by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone. Adam Elston's trio of stories explores the different faces of loss and estrangement. The three stories by M L Stedman draw on the sights, smells and sounds of her native Western Australia. Mark Saba's novella of identity moves artfully between Connecticut, Minnesota, and points more distant in space and time. Paul Blaney's four stories, diverse in voice and form, combine the everyday and the fabulous, deftly negotiating dream and memory, community and the individual's quest for happiness. The first of Guy Ware's two stories is a picaresque tale of love, death and second-hand cars, the second a bitterly humorous portrait of a deeply-troubled man. Shaun Levin's virtuoso study of the poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg brings the collection to a deeply satisfying close. 'This is what short stories are meant to do: show us flamboyantly what the novel can't do and without falling into stylistic games or losing emotional resonance. Diamonds are created by compressing carbon at high temperatures; these stories seem to be created by treating language and form in much the same way. They are diamonds and should be valued as such.' Sara Maitland

Desperate Remedies

Levin, Shaun

Blaney, Paul

Guy Ware

Mark Saba

Adam Elston

ML Stedman

Literature & Fiction

Apis Books

'Fleshing out the shadowy metaphysical hints of Beckett's novels, this intellectual romp is the best debut I have read in years' Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian Monday lunchtime: a bank is being robbed. The gunmen tell everyone to get down on the floor, but an old man refuses. Behind him in the queue is Rada Kalenkova, an investigator for the Office of Assessment, recording everything she sees. Shots are fired and a woman is killed. Or maybe two. But Rada ignores the murders and pursues the old man instead. Nothing about the robbery or the putative killings makes sense. The robbers might be police. The bank manager denies anyone was hurt, despite the blood on the walls. Every subsequent enquiry leads towards Edward Likker, a renowned fixer. But Likker is dead. The Fat of Fed Beasts is an ambitious literary mix of existential uncertainty, murder, bureaucracy, unreliable father figures and disaffected policemen. It asks why we do what we do, whether it matters, and what, if anything, our lives are worth. And it's funny. 'Ware has an uncluttered prose style and a willingness to stretch the boundaries of fiction. His sensibility is finely tuned to those grey areas of experience where identities shift, where people forget who they really are. No other writer springs to mind as a ready comparison to Ware: already he has defined a unique thematic territory.' Aiden O'Reilly, The Short Review

The Fat Of Fed Beasts (Salt Modern Fiction)

Literary

Salt Publishing

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Books by Guy Ware