"Ladykiller" is the astonishing debut collection of seven smart stories from an exciting new voice in Canadian literature. Charlotte Gill is a brilliant young writer who is not afraid to stare down the truth and shame the devil. She conjures compelling stories about escape, self-sabotage, and the power of unconscious desire. A couple plots against a crying baby in the apartment below as their dysfunctional relationship begins to veer off course. A hot-shot scuba-diving instructor falls for a teenaged girl in a perilous Lolita-like romance. Twin sisters travel to exotic lands in search of romance in order to rescue themselves from their own dark, intense bond. A woman reconnects with the son of her father's mistress, and together they begin an obsession with the past. A medical student embarks on an affair with a professor and discovers revolution in disastrous consequences. An unfaithful man takes his girlfriend to his ailing mother's for Christmas, only to find himself at the crossroads of sexual impulse and mortality. "Ladykiller" is peopled with characters who succumb to the allure of trouble, who find it more satisfying to ruin than create. Gill explores this terrain with empathy and wit. Shot through with comic irony and gentle satire, these are compelling stories about the foibles of the human heart. "Ladykiller" is a brave collection of short fiction that reveals the strange wisdom embedded in our darkest instincts.
Book Description
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Product Description
From Amazon
In her debut collection of razor-edged short fiction, Vancouver's Charlotte Gill explores the seamy side of sex in the city. The ladykiller of the title story gets his kicks from rubbing up against strange women in malls and parking garages. Other protagonists include a washed-up diving instructor who can't stop fantasizing about his 16-year-old student, a confused young woman who drifts into a disastrous affair with her middle-aged professor, and barracuda-like twin sisters on the prowl for men on a Thai beach. In "Hush," the most disturbing of these seven tales of contemporary urban life, a desperate couple fixates on the crying baby in the apartment below in a vain attempt to repair their frying relationship. "Hush" was a finalist for the Journey Prize, but an even more artful piece of fiction is the opening story, "You Drive." In alternating flashbacks, a pot dealer and his casual girlfriend recall the sequence of seemingly disconnected moments that brought them to a nearly fatal smash-up on a snowy cliff. This story twists and turns like the lonely strip of highway the two are speeding down, revealing character in fleeting drive-by glimpses.
Gill's language is richly sensual, raked through with strangely vivid images ("a snotty evening rain," "the buds of our earphones"). Although her metaphors occasionally twine out of control ("The sky is a big grey pancake with pink light sizzling at its distant images") and her characters are somewhat limited, Ladykiller is an intriguing first offering in much the same vein as the fiction of Lisa Moore and Elise Levine. --Lisa Alward
Review
"In Charlotte Gill's shockingly unsentimental stories, her emotional pyromaniacs hurtle towards various degress of conflagration. CAUTION: Her prose is booby-trapped with combinations of words so lethally effective they may as well be dynamite." (Zsuzsi Gartner)
"...topics and descriptive tactics are well wed to Gill's characters' sensibilities and make for some cleverly arresting observation and imagery. Her sense of satire is no less honed."
(Quill & Quire)"There is something both dark and tender in "Ladykiller". Charlotte Gill is a wise purveyor of the heart's loyal yet capricious nature. A stylish and sassy debut."
(Michael Winter)"...an excellent collection...This is an intelligent, contemporary book...Every story in "Ladykiller" sings in its own way. Nothing should have been done better in "Ladykiller". Charlotte Gill's voice is on every page, her sure eye for contemporary detail, her originality and unsentimental wit, her ability to deliver us to endings with a sense of having read tellingly about our own world. About ourselves, even. That is Charlotte Gill's authority. And that's also why, when finishing "Ladykiller", I wished I had something else written by Gill to open immediately. I wanted back in."
(Globe and Mail)Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By I Bipedal
Format:Paperback
I loved it. I started and finished it the same day. If you've read Palahniuk and Coupland, it is like a combo... well more Coupland than Palahniuk, but nevertheless so well written. Some of the stories have this feeling of being about nothing, which I love, because although nothing very drastic happens, there is this unrelenting tension and feeling of unresolved conflict all the way to the end of each one, and it leaves you unsatisfied but at the same time it feels so real. i don't really like neat endings. although the characters are incredibly unfeeling and cold, they are still three dimensional to a certain degree and again believable and real. they seem like regular people, because not everyone is as multi-dimensional as the dramatic characters portrayed in most novels. if you like satire and genuine characters/situations/outcomes, then read gill's stories. you won't be disappointed.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Tim Falconer
Format:Paperback
This remarkable debut features seven moving, beautifully-written stories by a writer we would all do well to watch. My favourite story in the collection is "Open Water: A Brief Romance" but they're all excellent. The characters are odd, but great, and I would do anything to be able to write the sentences Charlotte Gill can.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Jubejube
Format:Paperback
While I think this is a good piece of writing for someone who is fresh on the Canadian writer's market, I can't help but say that the stories in this book left me with a feeling like something was missing. The writing style was often clever, but the substance in the stories was lacking. I didn't feel at all connected with the characters, nor did their experience seem to tie into any other over-arching themes of human experience. They were all kind of meaningless, and at the end of each chapter I wondered 'what was the point of that?'. It didn't really take me anywhere. The character's felt a bit pointless, despite the sharp writing.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
