We craft and tell stories because we’ve stood on the uncertain edge between the waking world and our imagination, between enchantment and fear. And we remember other stories that help us build our own stories, scraps of lumber and fragments of narrative we gather together to make stories for ourselves.

Now Available: The Museum of Shadows and Reflections in Paperback

The Museum of Shadows and ReflectionsThanks to popular demand and critical acclaim, we’re delighted to announce the release of a new paperback edition of Claire Dean’s debut short story collection, The Museum of Shadows and Reflections.

If you had the bad fortune of missing the limited edition hardback, now’s your chance to finally get a copy of the collection. Or if you bought the limited edition and loved it (but of course), here’s your chance to buy copies to give to friends, loved ones, and random strangers who happen to be riding on the same bus.

This is a wonderful, haunting, enchanting book, and we’re thrilled to offer it to the world again in a new paperback edition.

You can find links to buy it here. And here’s an explanation about what this marvelous book is:

Long-listed for the 2017 Edge Hill Short Story Prize

Sometimes, we decide to try and live without our shadows. Sometimes we slip into someone else’s and live in their shape for a while. But try as we might, the old shadows linger. They’ve grown dusty, perhaps, brittle and faded, but look there—straggling out behind you and before you—the shadows of every shape you ever were, or once hoped to be. And when a new shape grows too heavy, when it gnaws holes in you or binds you, when your feathers fall to the carpet or the sand drags you underground, all your old shadows are still there… waiting.

A hauntingly powerful new voice in British fiction, this highly anticipated short story collection from Claire Dean showcases fourteen stories of wonder and memory, wind and water, metamorphosis and regret.

What Critics are Saying:

Claire Dean’s short stories are disturbingly and darkly beautiful…Not to be missed.

Jane Yolen, author of The Devil’s Arithmetic, &c.

 

A visionary map of overlooked lives and erased communities… [Dean’s] contemporary fairy tales are profound reflections on identity, alienation and loss.

Morning Star

 

Unsentimental and fearless… New myths for the twenty-first century. Unforgettable.

Ailsa Cox, Professor of Short Fiction, Edge Hill University

 

Beautiful, disturbing stories which will bear reading and rereading. I unreservedly recommend it.

Katherine Langrish, author of Troll Fell, &c.

 

There are few writers of short fiction with Claire Dean’s subtlety, penetration and vision… Essential reading for anyone who loves the short story.

Andy Hedgecock, writer, editor, and critic

 

Wonderfully told stories of flight and flood, of limitation and transformation… foreboding and life-affirming.

Carys Bray, author of A Song for Issy Bradley

The Museum of Shadows and Reflections
Claire Dean
Illustrated by Laura Rae
128 pages
Papaveria Press/Unsettling Wonder


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