Talking About It - Couverture souple

Collected here for the first time are the best stories from Tim Park's shorter fiction, spanning across his entire literary career and enriched by new stories written specifically for this publication. The title story of the collection, 'Talking About It', presents two friends, George and Michael, meeting ritually in a pub every night after a game of squash. While George recounts his increasingly extravagant sexual experiences, Michael listens on, meditating on how to redeem his boring and somewhat uneventful life. But then one day the tables turn, and Michael finds a way to outfox his friend and transfix his attention with a very interesting story. Whether describing the simmering warfare in an Italian condominium, the problems and pleasures of adultery, or the trappings of the generation game, these stories reveal Tim Park's deeply felt preoccupations with the inner workings of the human psyche and the dynamics of human relations.

'Parks's short fiction confirms his credentials as an acute chronicler of midlife disillusionment' --The Guardian

'...the flatness of Park's diction and the extremities of emotion - grief, lust, anger, betrayal - that his stories describe is unnerving, almost pornographic, to read. The cumulative effect is strangely addictive, however - bathos jostling pathos in a stylised rendition of the random savagery of real life.' --The Telegraph

'This catch-all volume is clever and readable throughout' --Kirkus Review