Joanna Walsh is the author of seven books, including a digital novel, Seed, which can be found at seed-story.com, and which has also been adapted for performance. Her writing has been widely published in anthologies and journals, including The Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2015, Granta, and Salt's Best British Short Stories, 2014 and 2015. She writes criticism for The Guardian, the New Statesman, and The TLS. She is a contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine and Catapult, and she runs #readwomen, described by the New York Times as "a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers."
“From the publisher that unearthed the brilliant and now-lauded
Nell Zink comes another slim work of fiction as strange as it is
compelling. Vertigo is a funny, absurd collection of stories.” —The
Huffington Post
“Think Renata Adler's Speedboat with a faster engine. . . . Vertigo
reads with the exhilarating speed and concentrated force of a
poetry collection. Each word seems carefully weighed and prodded
for sound, taste, touch. . . . The stories are delicate, but they
leave a strong impression, a lasting sense of detachment colliding
with feeling, a heady destabilization.” —Los Angeles Times
“Her writing sways between the tense and the absurd, as if it's
hovering between this world and another. This time last year,
Dorothy brought us Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper. Walsh's Vertigo may
similarly redistribute the possibilities of contemporary fiction,
especially if it meets with the wider audience her work demands.”
—Flavorwire, “33 Must Read Books for Fall 2015”
“Beautifully simple and unembellished, Walsh's writing—most
captivating in its ability to unnerve—is cleverly revealing of her
protagonist's unique and sensitive personality.” —The Guardian
“Reading Vertigo has opened even wider my conceptions of what's
possible in fiction—how a book can be like a series of photographs,
like cinema. These stories appear as much as they engage with
narrative, saturated with a calm yet rich color. I've not read
anything like it and feel it is quietly subverting the hell out of
the form.” —Amina Cain
“Stunning short, sharp shocks with insight that reminds me of the
very personal work of Clarice Lispector . . . Packs a wallop into a
very small space.” —Jeff VanderMeer
“This collection of work from 3:AM fiction editor Joanna Walsh
makes the familiar alien, breaking down and remaking quotidian
situations, and in the process turning them into gripping
literature.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Splendidly wry and offbeat . . . both intellectual and aware.
Stories to be digested slowly, and savored.” —Sunday Herald
“Supple, floating stories that unfold like memories almost too
painful to recall in an affectless voice that can be digressive or
disarmingly direct but which is ultimately devastating.” —The
Believer
“[T]his book is about how embarrassing it is to be alive, how each
of us is continually barred from our self. . . . Vertigo is a
writer's coup.” —The Rumpus
“The stories in Walsh's Vertigo are equally strange and edgy. She's
a flâneur who's just as capable of representing the exterior and
interior wreckage with equal precision. She takes on big
ideas—partnership, loneliness, femininity, etc.—through the vibrant
minutiae of contemporary experience.” —Electric Literature
“[H]er stories reveal a psychological landscape lightly spooked by
loneliness, jealousy and alienation.” —The New York Times
“The stories in Vertigo are by turns funny, surreal, modernist,
remaining at all times accessible.” —The Irish Times
“I'm not sure I've ever read a book so full of space, though most
of the distances are not geographical (some are)—they are distances
from which women observe themselves living lives, and although
these are lives mostly free of upheaval and privation, the
unhurried urgency with which they are observed makes everything
here seem vital and dangerous.” —Fanzine
“Each story is aglitter with pain and insight. . . . Moments of
blazing perspicacity, creativity, intelligence, and dark humor are
insanely abundant in [Walsh's] writing; they pop at every turn:
like nails in the sand: like diamonds in water.” —Numéro Cinq
“[W]hile Walsh's prose shares much stylistically with [Lydia]
Davis's, her depictions of women's inner lives are closer to
cinema. Vertigo summons the relentless long takes and domestic
claustrophobia of Jeanne Dielman; the black-and-white minimalism
and protracted flânerie of Cléo; the haunting silence at the
center of Barbara Loden's Wanda.” —Music & Literature
“Vertigo is a slim but deadly volume.” —Sydney Review of Books
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