Birds and Birthdays (Short Story Collection)

✍ Scribed by Barzak, Christopher

• Book ID: 107881563
• Publisher: Aqueduct Press
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 69 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781619760158

✦ Synopsis

Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning: three of the most interesting painters to flourish in male-dominated Surrealism. This is Christopher Barzaks tribute to them, three stories and an essay that enter into a humane surrealism which turns away from the unconscious and toward magic. Sometimes the stories themselves seem to be paintings. Sometimes painter and writer may be characters, regarding each other through a painful otherness, talking in shared secrets. Barzaks stories are huge with the spacious strangeness of worlds where there is always more room for a woman to escape her tormenters, or outgrow an older self. Here we find a bird-maker and a star-catcher whose shared history spills over into the birds and the stars themselves; a girl who outgrows her clothes, her house, and finally her townand leaves to find her body a new home; a landlord, whose marriage, motherhood, separation, sexual exploration, and excursions into self-portraiture all take place within a single apartment building. In Remembering the body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism, Barzak comments on the images that inspired these stories and discusses his own position as a writer among painters.