The Three Button Trick And Other Stories - Hardcover

Barker, Nicola

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880016779 ISBN 13: 9780880016773

Publisher: Ecco, 1999

Synopsis

Nicola Barker weaves humor and tragedy through this fresh and original collection, as her characters struggle to find love, independence, and fulfillment in this new addition to the Ecco Art of the Story series

Nicola Barker's collection of her nineteen most brilliant stories exemplifies her ability to create daring, witty, and dynamic characters, all their idiosyncracies intact. Barker's stories often use wordplay and humor to stretch the boundaries of metaphor and reality as the outrageously original plots unfold. Through her confident and clever style, these short stories sling Barker to the forefront of fiction writing, as she is reminiscent of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Margaret Atwood.

The collection begins with a smart tale of a teenage girl whose obsession with the size of her nose dangerously compromises her relationships with her friends and her family. "Inside Information" is a pun of a title, describing how the protagonist's unborn fetus is the only one able to reform his mother's compulsive shoplifting by pulling the ultimate prank. "G-String" and "Symbiosis: Class Cestoda" detail women who gain self-esteem, albeit through quirky methods, despite the cowardly men who try to suppress them. The title story, "Three Button Trick," is about a man who deliberately buttons his duffel coat incorrectly to attract sympathetic females. Carrie falls for this trick, and it takes twenty-one years, a curious friend, and an eighty-three-year-old widower for her to realize her mistake. Wesley is the protagonist of a three-part collection, "Blisters," "Braces," and "Mr. Lippy" who, traumatized by two unfortunate incidents as a young boy, is an eccentric obsessed with freedom and the sea.

Barker skillfully intertwines humor with despair to stimulate any reader's interest; she taps into the psyches of her characters to create an authentic, original, and highly enjoyable read. The Three Button Trick and Other Stories is a resonant, audacious volume from a writer of immense talent and originality.

About this title

About the Author

Nicola Barker is one of Britain's most original and exciting literary talents. She is the author of two short-story collections: Love Your Enemies [winner of the David Higham Prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award] and Heading Inland [winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize]. Her previous novels are Reversed Forecast, Small Holdings, Wide Open Behindlings and Clear, the last of which was long-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize. Her work is translated into twenty languages, and in 2000, she won the IMPAC Award for Wide Open. In 2003, Nicola Barker was named a Granta Best of British Novelist. She lives in London.

From the Back Cover

Audacious, original, clever, poignant -- these are just a few words that describe the writing of Nicola Barker, a talented, award-winning author whose work brings to mind Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Maragaret Atwood. Now nineteen of her finest short stories have been complied into one brilliant, delightful readable volume.

It takes young Carrie twenty-one years and a chance meeting with an eighty-three-year-old widow to realize she fell victim to her husband's "Three Button Trick." The main character in "Wesley" must work through his troubled childhood in a series of episodes involving masses of eels, an imaginary friend named Joy, and an unmentionable incident with an emu-owl. From erotic encounters behind clothing racks to a kleptomaniac with his organs on the wrong side, this daring and gifted writer never fails to surprise us, entertain us, and make us think.

Reviews

The British author of three novels (Wide Open, etc.) and two collections of short stories (Heading Inland [1983] and Love Your Enemies, both of which contribute stories to this volume), Barker has a demonstrated penchant (a fondness, even) for writing about the freakish twists life holds for average or extraordinary misfits, neurotics and the walking wounded. In this wildly imaginative and thoroughly entertaining collection, readers meet Bendy Linda, the circus contortionist; Nick, the boy born with his organs reversed (heart on the right side, liver on left); young women with breast fetishes, nose fixations, fears of fat and secret sexualities. It's not so much that Barker works a sideshow but that, like R. Crumb, she has a clear-eyed, if sardonic, take on the characters she captures in quick, witty strokes, from the school teacher whose "life was as flat as the fens" to the personnel officer in "a lambswool polo-neck which clung at her throat as tight and sure as the skin of a banana." These stories are edgy, always subverting expectations and sometimes turning magical, as in "Inside Information," where an expectant mother learns to unzip her belly so her fetus can complain. In "Symbiosis," a formerly pudgy ex-girlfriend shows off her new svelte shape and the reason for it: a tapeworm. The title story is a merry farce about a 44-year-old, still beautiful woman whose husband leaves her, 22 years after he first got her sympathy and attention by deliberately misbuttoning his coat. "G-String" describes the night Gillian, "a nervous size 16," the uncomfortable and mortified first-time wearer of thong underwear instead of her usual roomy drawers, finally tells off her fussy and dismissive boyfriend. Barker's subjects are often raw and irreverently sexy, while her endings are sometimes abrupt, but she never fails to surprise and delight with incisive writing and piercing wit, to say nothing of all the vivid characters inhabiting these rambunctious and witty stories. (July) FYI: Barker has won the 1997 John Llewellen Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize, the 1993 David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Fiction.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Terse, droll, and unsettling tales from a highly idiosyncratic young British writer. Barker has drawn together 19 stories from two collections not yet published here. They share with her novels (Wide Open, 1998, etc.) a conviction that life is stranger than we imagineand perhaps stranger than we can imagineand that only those willing to pursue extreme behavior of one sort or another (or incapable of doing otherwise) are likely to glimpse the true, deeply weird parameters of existence. A 16-year-old girl, in ``Layla's Nose Job,'' is burdened with a grotesque nose. But plastic surgery only serves to demonstrate that her strangeness isn't just skin-deep. The discovery turns her ingeniously violent. In ``Inside Information,'' Martha, a professional shoplifter, becomes pregnant and attempts to turn her pregnancy to criminal advantage, only to find herself harassed by her foetus, which not only can talk but proves to have grisly plans of its own. It's impossible, many of these stories argue, for outsiders to escape their alienation. In three related pieces (``Blisters,'' ``Braces,'' and ``Mr. Lippy'') featuring Wesley, a charming but damaged young man, attempts at normality are grimly, inevitably defeated. In ``Skin,'' two young women, longtime friends, are driven apart when one of them has an odd (and liberating) sexual encounter with a male shoplifter at the clothing store where she works, finding that the event opens up a new world to her, one that is ``simple, unadulterated, natural and yet unnatural,'' and one that terrifies her seemingly sophisticated friend. In the title story, one of Barker's most naturalistic, a middle-aged woman, whos been abandoned by her husband, discovers, thanks to the ministrations of several odd acquaintances, how little she needs himand how wayward and liberating true eroticism is. The high strangeness quotient here means that these tales aren't for everyone. But those with a taste for odd, haunting characters, unsettling incidents, and a deadpan, savage sense of humor, will likely find them uniquely stirring. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Three Button Trick is a stunning assortment of storiesAoriginal, witty, and peculiarAfrom two award-winning collections, Love Your Enemies and Heading Inland. Barker takes everyday events and ordinary people and fashions them into the extraordinary, bizarre, and dynamic. In "Inside Information," Martha, a pregnant shoplifter, takes advantage of her pregnancy to benefit her kleptomania. Her fetus, a thinking and speaking character, loathes Martha and retaliates, and she becomes forever a criminal. In "Dual Balls," Joanna dares her conservative schoolteacher friend Selina to wear a sexual instrument under her clothing in the classroom. Selina is able to squeak by the suspicions of school officials because of her innocent reputation. Barker's wit and creativity are definitely out of the ordinary and will be highly appealing to some, though they may be an acquired taste.AJudith Ann Akalaitis, Supreme Court of Illinois Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0880016779
• ISBN 13: 9780880016773
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224