Jeremy Fisher’s new book sees him wrestling with his obsessions, exploring and encountering the world in a range of voices and genres. The personal and political merge in these stories, which often veer on the edge of reality. A simmering gay, BDSM, corrupt Sydney emerges in “The poofter’s dog”. “On Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse in a Vietnamese café” and “Mementos” are meditations on life outside the mainstream and its simplicities and complexities. “Letter to my children” addresses a gay man’s spiritual heirs. In “The rotary coconut scraper” a bemused tourist encounters the wrath of the Sri Lankan Army while in “The North German Publishing Company” an author finds his book a success in Germany, but as a comedy, not the tragedy he thought he wrote. The title story, a powerful account of the death of a parent, details the bonds of love and duty between father and son. In this book you will find sex, death, love, blood and lust along with laughter and delight.
“Vivid, visceral stories, full of feeling. Anger and love are sometimes in brutal, open contest here. Fisher renders these engagements between fathers and sons, coppers and young men, those who punish and those who are punished, with an artful economy. Tone is skilfully managed – there is bawdy and sly humour, the contemplative, and deep sorrow too.”
ANGELO LOUKAKIS, author of Houdini’s flight, The memory of tides and For the patriarch.