Join us for a virtual event with Rebecca Watson, author of Little Scratch, & Colin Barrett on Thursday, July 29th at 5pm Central!
Rebecca Watson's little scratch is an immersive experience, an exhilarating plunge into the mundanity and the horror and the mundane horror of a day in a life that is not quite right. It's experimental in the best sense of the word: Watson bends form to accommodate a narrator who wants desperately to communicate but cannot quite bring herself to speak.
-Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation
About the book:
A dazzlingly original, shot-in-the-arm of a debut that reveals a young woman's every thought over the course of one deceptively ordinary day, in the formally innovative tradition of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Ducks, Newburyport.
She wakes up, goes to work. Watches the clock and checks her phone. But underneath this monotony there's something else going on: something under her skin.
Relayed in interweaving columns that chart the feedback loop of memory, the senses, and modern distractions with wit and precision, our narrator becomes increasingly anxious as the day moves on: Is she overusing the heart emoji? Isn't drinking eight glasses of water a day supposed to fix everything? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom so fraught? How does she define rape? And why can't she stop scratching?
Fiercely moving and slyly profound, little scratch is a defiantly playful look at how our minds function in --and survive --the darkest moments.
About the author:
Rebecca Watson is the author of little scratch. She is one of The Observer's 10 best debut novelists of 2021, and was recently shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her work has been published in the TLS, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. She works part-time as Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times and lives in London. Photo credit: Sophie Davidson
Colin Barrett was born in 1982 and grew up in County Mayo. In 2009 he was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize, and in 2014 his debut collection of stories Young Skins was published and awarded The Rooney Prize, The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize and The Guardian First Book Award. His stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly magazine, the New Statesman, the New Yorker, Harper's and read on Radio 4. He is currently working on a novel.
Email or call for price.
Email or call for price.
