Things That Never Happen - Softcover

M. John Harrison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1892389339 ISBN 13: 9781892389336

Publisher: Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc., 2003

Synopsis

John Harrison is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in England. Over the last 30 years Harrison has been inspiring readers and writers alike on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite this, Harrison's fiction is almost entirely unavailable in the United States. This book collects 24 of Harrison's best pieces of short fiction, including several which have never before seen publication in the United States. Things That Never Happen features an introduction and extensive story notes by the author, as well as an introduction by China Mieville (Perdido Street Station).

About this title

About the Author:

M. John Harrison was born in the Peak District and now lives in London.

From Publishers Weekly:

"In some places, we're all ghosts," Harrison writes in "The Incalling," one of 24 superlative stories in this British author's first U.S. collection. From the "warren of defeated streets" between Camden Rd. and St. Pancras in London to the "glacial moraines of Stake pass, where dragonflies clatter mournfully through the brittle reed-stems," Harrison writes ghost stories without any ghosts in them. His characters typically live in the margins, or have conspired to live there through the vagaries of fate or experience. They quiver on the edge of discovering a great truth, uncovering a vast secret about the universe, or living a life previously unknown to them. Such characters are often enraptured by a vision or obsession invisible to the rest of us. The painter's precision with which Harrison works and the aversion to cliche and generic detail make his prose style hyper-real even in his most fantastical tales. "The Egnaro," "The Great God Pan," "Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring" and "The Neon Heart Murders" are particularly brilliant and compare favorably with the work of any fiction writer in the world, whether genre or mainstream. Wise, unflinching, precise, these stories immerse us in a world we thought we knew but that stands revealed by turns as richer, starker and more complex.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc.
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1892389339
• ISBN 13: 9781892389336
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 443