Description
“Funny and serious, with a subtle power that accumulates like a shoplifter adding coat upon coat.”—Mark Anthony Jarman
The stories in What Endures range through and respond to a clickbait world evolving at terrifying speed, revealing the absurd and ridiculous nature of everyday life What does it mean to endure in a world starving for truth and connection, what makes life worth living, what can be discovered and preserved from the onrush of experience—vicarious and actual—that comes at us? With bracing wit, Pauline Holdstock’s stories move back and forth through time and circumstance to unpack what it is that saves us from despair, each of them pointing in their own magical way to that one, fragile thing that has the power to endure and to live on in others.
Praise for What Endures
“What Endures is a wry book of fraught dinner parties that lead to lawsuits, savagely remote teenagers, and midlife brain surgery. Pauline Holdstock explores small acts of charity and small magic tricks in the Sunday fields of memory, and the results are funny and serious, with a subtle power that accumulates like a shoplifter adding coat upon coat.”
—Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Smash & Grab
Praise for Pauline Holdstock
“[The Blackbird’s Song] examines questions of faith, meaning and power; [Holdstock’s] investigation of these issues is profound and beautifully paced, so that despite the intensity of the subject, the momentum of the narrative never falters, the evocation of place and time having an almost cinematic immediacy.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“The Blackbird’s Song presents real violence in its barest form . . . The bleakness of the author’s prose and the compressed power of her observation make this an extraordinary first novel on the interplay of anger, love, and duty.”
—The Times
“[Here I Am! is] a moving tale about the invisibility children suffer when they are not heard and seen as their unique selves . . . Holdstock inhabits the mind of a bright, funny, and sensitive child through exuberant, playful language that doesn’t mask the darkness of his life. Frankie’s description of curling up on his dead mother’s lap is heart-rending . . . An unforgettable story about one very special child.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Beyond Measure]’s exploration of passion, jealousy and ambition is underlaid by riveting, macabre descriptions of human dissections witnessed by its artist protagonists. Holdstock’s vivid, unflinching tale doesn’t sugarcoat the casual brutality of the period, and is punctuated by startling moments of beauty.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A deftly crafted and wickedly fun read from cover to cover, Confessions with Keith by novelist Pauline Holdstock is the kind of story that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf.”
—Midwest Book Review
