Love Sex Travel Musik - Softcover

Glass, Rodge

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908754168 ISBN 13: 9781908754165

Publisher: Freight Books, 2014

Synopsis

Beautifully crafted, perceptive, sometimes shocking, and often heartbreaking stories that examine the impact of cheap international travel on modern lives and relationships

A boys' weekend in Eastern Europe spirals out of control. A bleeding tourist is rescued by a stranger in downtown Toronto. A middle-aged woman vacationing in Tunisia considers the local options for love. An unemployed man shares his fantasies of a sex tour of Arizona with his long-suffering girlfriend. A woman is drawn into an impromptu but life-changing football game in the heart of the Amazon. With wit, wisdom, insight, and pathos, this collection examines men and women of all ages who, through the advent of discount air travel, play out their lives and loves across the globe. It brilliantly captures the isolation, dislocation, and occasional epiphanies of those who find themselves 1,000 miles from home, and those who long to be.

About this title

About the Author

Rodge Glass is a novelist and the author of the biography Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography, which won a Somerset Maugham Award.

Reviews

The title of this short story collection truthfully describes the themes of the book’s 14 short fiction pieces, 10 previously published in a variety of venues, one translated into Serbian. The stories themselves showcase Glass’ formidable talent: they are packed with emotion, with the vagaries of behavior caused by familial relationships and friendships, and they are told with shrewdness and wit. Threads of loss permeate the plots, while the use of voice, tone, and point of view brings characters alive. Although many of the stories are told in first-person singular, in “Orientations #1, #2, and #3,” Glass skillfully uses second person to depict place and skewer characters. Several stories feature the alcoholic adventures and erotic experiences of men flying off on business or for escape or both. “Intervention,” a dazzling breakup rant, takes place totally in the fantasies of a man flying back to a newly empty home. Brilliant writing, the variety of locales, and the bold portrayal of character will delight short story and literary-fiction readers and may create demand for Glass’ previous novels. --Ellen Loughran

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Love Sex Travel Musik

By Rodge Glass

Freight Books

Copyright © 2013 Rodge Glass
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-908754-16-5

Contents

'I Want to Be a Tourist' by Kapka Kassabova, 
A Weekend of Freedom, 
There's Always Arizona, 
Do All Things With Love, 
Orientation #1, 
The Monogamy Optician, 
After Drink You Can Turn Earth Upside Down, 
I Know My Team and I Shall Not Be Moved, 
Intervention, 
Orientation #2, 
We're All Gonna Have the Blues, 
The Hips on Planet Latina, 
59 Places to Fuck in Arizona, 
Liberation Street, 
Orientation #3, 
Credits and Acknowledgements, 

CHAPTER 1

    I WANT TO BE A TOURIST

    by Kapka Kassabova

    I imagine my life as a city
    somewhere in the third world, or the second.
    And I want to be a tourist
    in the city of my life.

    I want to stroll in shorts and baseball hat,
    with laminated maps and dangling cameras.
    I want to find things for the first time.
    Look, they were put there just for me!

    I want a room with musty curtains.
    I want a view of rubbish dumps and urchins.
    I want food poisoning, the dust of traffic
    in the mouth, the thrill of others' misery.

    Let me be a tourist in the city of my life.
    Give me overpriced coffee in the square,
    let me visit briefly the mausoleum of the past
    and photograph its mummy,

    give me the open sewers, the stunted dreams,
    the jubilation of ruins, the lepers, the dogs,
    give me signs in a funny language that I never
    have to learn. Then take my money and let me go.

CHAPTER 2

A WEEKEND OF FREEDOM

This time last year I was melting. I could hardly persuade myself to get up for work in the mornings. My marriage was no marriage at all. All I'd ever wanted was to be able to afford good suits without having to check the price tag, but recently the fat salary my Dad would have killed for had been somehow getting sucked away from me, going on an over ambitious mortgage, on bills, on five different-but-apparently-all-thoroughly-essential types of insurance, on taxes, two cars, a pension: the rest was wasted on expensive wine I didn't appreciate. Meals in restaurants with menus entirely in French.

Heather said I wasn't awake anymore — even my only hobby wasn't really mine. I searched out old war memorabilia, First and Second World War mainly, a habit and a collection inherited from my Dad. They're my little containers of history, he said. Not always beautiful, but then, things of value rarely are. One piece was a regimental cigarette case with an engraving explaining it had been presented to a soldier by the Princess Mary Christmas Fund in 1914. I kept that one in a special locked glass case. Heather often asked what happened to the man she fell in love with. Well, you don't notice it happening. Life just gets gradually narrower, until a ray of sun is enough to make a good day and a splash of rain is enough to make a bad one.

Then two things happened in the same week: first, I got made redundant. Cutbacks due to challenging ec

Edition details

• Publisher: Freight Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908754168
• ISBN 13: 9781908754165
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 234