Diddle - Softcover

Staniforth, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908011181 ISBN 13: 9781908011183

Publisher: Skylight Press, 2011

Synopsis

Diddle is a series of absurd, impossible, but faintly connected stories about immigrants living in the USA that will serve to deconstruct the "American Dream" mythos. Somehow each story typifies the experience of life for outsiders in the US, coupled with the impossibility of absolute acculturation. The book comprises a dozen short stories, each generated out of a line from the old nursery rhyme, laced with double entendres, multiple meanings and overlaps. These tales, written by a poet with a rich touch of language, question the very notion of identity and belonging, instead presenting the amalgamated state that most people are forced to live in.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Edgbaston and raised in Clapham and Bolton, Daniel Staniforth is a writer, composer and teacher. His music recordings include works by Alchymical Muse, Luna Trick and Rebsie Fairholm, with whom he works regularly. Daniel writes poetry, fiction and literary analysis.

Review

"With the poise and spark of a master storyteller, Daniel Staniforth presents an alchemical phantasmagoria of loosely connecting figures moving like ghosts on the liminality of their adopted culture. Tempered always with warmth and wit, Diddle achieves a lightness of narrative touch which shimmers over the profundity of human experience for the detached and displaced."
-- Rebecca Wilby

"I really enjoyed Diddle. Read it through at a gallop. Had a good brood. Delightful, enviable concept: the jolly rhythms and absurd imagery of the innocent nursey rhyme linking modern American experiences that seem to be simple, but which are fraught with undercurrents. There's a sharpness, a pleasing kind of uneasiness in it, that I couldn't quite put my finger on... I'm off to read it again. There are things going on beneath other things. It's dead good."-- Alan Richardson 

"A very old nursery rhyme (16th century England maybe) strings these 11 stories together, looping them back to an English home country - on a very long and elastic tether. Did I say funny? The stories are terrible. Grotesque. Tragic. Weird. Unsettling. Full of rifts and panic. And hilarious...
Only a poet who lives several lives can get us readers to hear and see this way. Take the trip with him."
-- Martha King

"Diddle is packed with stories that fully articulate their premise and characters, coil like a spring, and then come to fruition when you least expect it. They have a genuine and original rhythm, one that will make you think differently about what fiction can do." 
-- Brian Evenson

" ...the work he does is really unusual, strange, interesting! I love the ways he uses language, and his ear is terrific..."-- Rikki Ducornet 

Edition details

• Publisher: Skylight Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908011181
• ISBN 13: 9781908011183
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80