Author(s): Matthew Holt

Short Stories

Asymmetries is a collection of short stories and flash fiction which pieces together indistinct impressions and allusions to gradually create a sense of continuity. Though formal experimentation these mysterious and often humorous compositions emulate contemporary modes of perception - the experience of having no fixed point of view, of being immersed in the fleeting, the aleatory and the fragmentary. In such a state of affairs, we are at once observing and being observed, inside and outside, the centre and the periphery. The book can be placed in the tradition of surreal, tragic-comic modernism, evoking the milieu of Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Bernhard, and Walser. Asymmetries attempts to find a new objectivity in which the forms of contemporary perception are married to literary technique. "An invigorating tumbler of dark matter which should be swallowed whole, in a single draught." - Thomas Crosse