All of Us with Our Pointless Worries and Inconsequential Dramas

Book excerpt: These stories are for anyone who has ever felt they were an outsider, marching to the beat of their own drum and trying to discover some reality hidden within the cliché of modern life, love and work. From the author of Leaving London For mature readers. Includes The Paris Quartet: Short Stories For the End of the World This is your life and you may just recognize yourself within these seventeen short stories and six plays. If you’ve ever been in a less than perfect relationship, been trapped in a meaningless job, have found yourself drunk, lost and alone in a new city on Christmas Eve or have simply spent years trying to escape from a situation of your own making then you may just find some comfort within these pages. Contemporary stories of doomed love affairs, cheating spouses and new beginnings in cities such as Paris, New York and London. A family dinner party where the elephant in the room threatens to reveal itself, girlfriends who leave, boyfriends who can’t commit and a reclusive anti-hero fighting a corporate giant all make an appearance within this collection of gritty and darkly humorous short stories. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reviews This is a wonderful collection of short stories (and plays) which mine deeply emotional and personal territory, which is one of Crystal’s major strengths as a writer. All of these stories are deeply relatable and hyper-realistic – you either know these characters or perhaps you have found yourself in these very same situations. Each of them leaves the reader with much more than what is on the surface – ala Ernest Hemingway and/or Raymond Carver – and will have you thinking about them long after you finish reading them. - Julian Gallo, author of Breathe Garry Crystal's title for his collection of short stories and one scene plays aptly summarizes a dominant theme at the same time that it seems to dismiss the content as near meaningless. Most of these narratives depict the all too common scene for thirty-something people in the big city; struggles at recovery from ruined relationships, lapses into sloth, alcohol, drugs, casual, sometimes barely civil, sexual encounters and, of course, depression that blankets these scenes of urban discontent like a grey, palpable fog. For all this, I could not dismiss as dreary cliche' this highly entertaining and thought provoking collection. It was fun to read and at some points, downright intriguing. Dark humor and a conversational first person narrator style preserve the several stories of an alienated young urban male from triteness. Situations that, if our jaded narrator did not so masterfully depict them, might be all too familiar for interest. In "The Conversationalists", for example, he endures a mercifully short relationship with the beautiful, but totally self-absorbed Serena. It's the artful recreation of a scene that this reader and, I'm sure, many others have encountered in real life. The difference being that most of us do not in our suffering of a "me personality" interlocutor turn the encounter into a lively and entertaining short story. There are women characters who in dialogue express cogent insights as they relentlessly pursue an evasive and emotionally remote male incapable of authentic commitment. I would think that many women readers would find strong female characters like these quite satisfying. This collection has much to offer to readers from a broad band of tastes who enjoy good story telling. Those who enjoy nuanced meaning and dark ambiguities delivered by way of succinct narration and lively dialogue, these stories are the right stuff. - Online Book Club