The thirty-three flash fictions of Love Stories for Hectic People explore the alignment of beings that is love. There is love that is vulgar, love that knows no reason; there is love that cradles the act of living, love that springs through the cracks; love that is slaughtered. These tales take place from Italy to Ghana to Greece and London and Tokyo, in grainy cities and muted hotel rooms; there is a Mafia murder, an ambulance rescue worker and a woman whose husband falls off a mountain. There is unchaste attraction and slippery, nuanced love; police violence and porn, and fishing too.
Praise for Love Stories for Hectic People
I rarely receive a review copy, sit right down and read most of it in one sitting. Catherine McNamara’s Love Stories for Hectic People had me doing that. It’s a beguiling collection of flash fiction – the author’s third – that’s as briskly inventive and various as the form demands, embracing sensuality and ugliness in equal measure, and darting from one international encounter to another. Love lies at the heart of the matter, each time round, but grief and brutality are there, too.’The country where he was born had scorched hills and quixotic animals and wise elders with spectacularly gnarled toes…’
—Michael Caines, Brixton Review of Books
Like a raconteur in a lamplit Venetian bar, McNamara understands the charm and architecture of a tale. These structurally compressed fictions still cover significant ground as one consequence topples like a domino into the next, and conflicts modulate between forms. Yet, unlike a bar-room raconteur, McNamara rarely offers us easy resolutions. Her characters wrestle through their cosmopolitan situations, while lust, violence, and repulsion simmer in the midst of romance, sensuality, and intimacy. Love Stories for Hectic People is that rare thing – a book that gets better with each re-reading. McNamara has produced, in these stylish modern fables, a sophisticated study of relationships. She holds up an ornate mirror flecked with shadows.
—Michael Loveday, Three Men on the Edge
Catherine McNamara is one of the best writers I’ve read in all the time I’ve been in publishing. She can do more in two hundred words than most writers can do in two hundred pages. By turns real, funny, dark, magic, ugly, and beautiful. This collection rocks.
—Christopher James, Jellyfish Review
Seductive love, evaporating love and sometimes ‘increasingly superb’ love: it’s all in these pages. Sharp, witty and deeply real, these small stories reveal moments of connections, and sometimes dissolution. One can’t help but be captivated by these many and varied truths, as examined by Catherine McNamara – and the conclusion, despite the darkness, that ‘Love Is an Infinite Victory’.
—Michelle Elvy, the everrumble
Sometimes quiet and reflective, sometimes sensual and visceral, these thirty-three short pieces are assured meditations on the foibles and complexities of love – the making and unmaking of it. This collection drifts across continents and cultures, slowly unbuttoning aspects of relationships between an eclectic cast of characters, and the places they find themselves.
—K.M. Elkes, All That Is Between Us
Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris to write, and ended up in Ghana co-running a bar. On the way she lived in Milan, Mogadishu and Brussels, working as a translator, graphic designer, teacher, art gallery director, shoe model, mother. The Cartography of Others was a finalist in the People’s Book Prize (UK) and won the Eyelands International Fiction Award (Greece). Pelt and Other Stories was a semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize (USA) and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award (Ireland). Her short fiction has been Pushcart-nominated and published widely. Catherine lives in a farmhouse in northern Italy.
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Chris Bowers –
A very nice idea, and a book you can dip into and out of depending on how much time you have. Some stories are great, others feel like poems that don’t scan or rhyme, and too many of them end abruptly. That’s the problem with short love stories – you draw the reader in but if they’re too short you leave the reader hanging and feeling a bit let down. A nice stocking-filler, and hopefully a model the author can develop as the potential is there if she views this as a work in progress.
Louella Lester (verified owner) –
I love flash and I so enjoyed these stories about crazy messy love and lust. You must read it.
Raluca Comanelea –
Love Stories for Hectic People: 33 flash pieces which celebrate and demonize love in all its variants: purity, carnal knowledge, passionate lust, philosophical quest, unquenched thirst of the other. In them, a family man wonders what to do with his fainted mistress as his day is lined up already. Another desires the inappropriate type. Yet another attempts to reinvent the cinematic female persona into a random Letizia. In them, a woman feels the pangs of separation in her blood. Another writes a book about her lover’s death, while the audience grows thirsty for more. Yet another leaves residue of her body on his bedcovers, residue that would pass in the promises of his thoughts. In them, both man and woman forget and are forgotten at a party in Moscow. When body becomes a tool for pleasure, she is unaware of the face attached above, and he, he looks at her golden locks and sees a goddess. With the passage of years, she grows increasingly superb while he, he grows plum with a crushed, worried face. A last hike together, in mutual understanding of a life’s ending as they both knew it. In them, breakups are easy when both attempt to crawl into each other’s dreams and recreate trips to Corfu with misplaced monetary sums. In them, lovers live on different continents and time zones and contrasting seasons: she knows his wife’s hair color and he knows her daughters’ names. In them, lovers wonder whether their shared love can be contained in a bulky, cul-de-sac home with a peculiar history.
These 33 flash stories take you on a pilgrimage to find love, a love that sometimes turns to lust, and that is all right. They show you brutal endings and disgusting pleasures, scraps of love at times, or the icy slopes in return for a misplaced love. But when love is love, and it is simple, both man and woman live it as such.