Matilda Bathurst

Short and surreal

Tales of the desperate and surreal include hungry comic-book characters who resort to eating their own speech bubbles

issue 22 August 2015

‘I just wanted the damn story to ask the right questions,’ sighs a disaffected journalist in Jack Livings’s debut collection of short stories, The Dog. Two other new short story collections, Lucky Alan by Jonathan Lethem and Jellyfish by Janice Galloway, are less interested in asking the right questions than in the opportunities for missing the point.

Livings draws upon his experience as a student in Beijing to create a compelling vision of China from the Cultural Revolution to the present day.

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