David Gaffney

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Biographical note:  David Gaffney lives in Manchester. He has worked as an English teacher, a pub pianist, a debt counsellor. His collection, Sawn-off Tales, was published by Salt in 2006 to critical acclaim.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713424
ISBN:  9781844713424
Author:  David Gaffney
Title:  Aromabingo
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Oct-07
Extent:  144pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  16 mm
Weight:  216 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Aromabingo builds on the critical success of David Gaffney’s 2006 collection Sawn-off Tales, offering yet more of Gaffney’s weird and edgy ultra-shorts, plus several longer works, so you can spend even more time inside the baffling, hilarious and sometimes moving world of a David Gaffney story. Think Magnus Mills mashed with the League of Gentlemen with a jolt of Mark E. Smithery for grit, and you’re nearly there. Though many of his stories are shorter than a Napalm Death snarl, these precision-engineered slivers of fiction leave you with the dying chords of a symphony. They are about the small people, the tiny Tardis folk with cathedrals inside them, creeping by unnoticed. These tales will have you laughing like at a Tommy Cooper video though there’s something hideous gnawing at the door to get in. Be careful, a spoonful weighs a ton.

Table of contents:
1. 45 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE:
Art Movement
The Kids from Film Noir
Pretty, Ain’t It?
All Mod Cons
Sniffin’ Glue
Still in Box
Speaking in Pantone
Die like a Rock
Great Inventions # 1
Lucky Winner
A Good Deal
Through the Medium of Modern Dance
Great Inventions # 2
Smaller than One Eightieth the Diameter of a Human Hair
Blurred Girls
The Secret Pictures of David Cameron
The Newt Lady’s Dead Now
The Life of Riley
You’ve Chosen to be Excited
Great Inventions # 3
Are We Romping Now?
Clown-Time is Over
The Accused Made Spider Furniture
Container Driver
Using the Facilities
When Chairs Attack
Shooting Lulu
A Feel for Format
Grockel Bashing
Cleaning up New York
Aromabingo
2. TWELVE-INCH SINGLES:
The Happiness Well
Last Chance to Turn Around
You and You Alone
Only the Stones Remain
In the Days Before Trickery
The Nineteen Seventy-Six Trouser Famine
Who reads this story will not sin
What Would Bill Hicks Do?
Mean Picking
The Last Northerner
3. LONG PLAYERS:
This is About Dixie
Finding Skerryvore
Does Anyone Care for You on a Regular Basis?
Special Pudding
Guided by Voices
Gossamer
4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Excerpt from book:  

Art Movement

Howard had no talent for painting. He joined the class to meet attractive women and had a vague idea that if he developed a few basic skills they would pose naked for him. For this reason he had set up his easel next to Yvonne. Yvonne had remarkable hair – a neat black bob with the sheen of sump oil, and an unusual solidity, like a plastic hat. She also had an attractive way of nipping her lower lip between her teeth while she concentrated on her painting, which was a picture of a bird standing on an apple. Howard was about to mention that a bird probably wouldn’t stand on an apple as the apple would roll away, when she leaned over and asked him, in a low whisper, if he had noticed that every colour of paint had its own little name written on the tube. Her voice was pleasantly croaky, as if she smoked a lot, and her bob of black hair brushed Howard’s cheek as she spoke.

He looked at the tube he was holding. ‘Yes,’ he whispered, with one eye on the tutor who could be rather strict about chatter. ‘The yellow’s called Buttercup Meadow.’

‘Have you seen the name of the colour black? It is positively offensive,’

Howard looked at the tube she had thrust into his face. Written on it were the words THE SILENCE OF DEATH.
He laughed. ‘Creepy.’

‘It’s just not acceptable,’ she said. ‘For many, many, many reasons.’

Howard didn’t know what she meant, but he liked the way her bob of black hair brushed his face and, because this sensation had suddenly become very important to him, he decided to agree with everything she said.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Why would death be silent?’ Yvonne continued. ‘When we meet up with our loved ones in heaven it will most certainly not be silent. It will be riotous! Chatting, singing, dancing. For example, my grandmother died last year and she hated silence – telly on full blast all day long.’ She turned back to her canvas and angrily squeezed a curl of the offending colour onto her canvas. ‘And another thing.’ She swivelled violently, making her solid bob of hair swing. ‘Why reserve this particular name for the colour black? If anything, death should be should be a colour that celebrates, it should be,’ she clawed at the air for words, ‘gold. The celebration of a new beginning. You know what this paint tube says to me?’ She tossed it across the room, where it bounced off an easel and landed on the floor, spinning for a few seconds on the polished wood. ‘It says that when you are dead there’s nothing, and that is offensive to Jesus, and if it offends Jesus it offends me.’

***

Howard and Yvonne entered the classroom by forcing a window with a screwdriver and used a torch to find their way about.

Squeezing all the black paint into one bowl and the gold into another was easy, but it was another matter entirely to put the black paint into the gold paint tubes and the gold paint into the black tubes.

‘I’m getting it everywhere,’ Yvonne said. ‘I need to take my shirt off.’

‘Me too.’

They stood there for a time, Yvonne in her bra, Howard’s pale hairless chest shining in the amber light from the street lamp outside. Then he dipped his hand into the bowl of black and daubed a thick streak across her tummy. ‘For Jesus,’ he said.

‘Keep going,’ said Yvonne, and he did.

By the end of the night Howard’s hands were caked and everything was gold and black. Yvonne was smothered in it. Even her immaculately clipped bobbed hair was clumped up in gluey golden peaks. The only parts of her that weren’t gold and black were the palms of her hands where they’d been held together in prayer.

Previous review quote:  Utterly brilliant. Hilariously demented and wonderfully succinct. David Gaffney’s Sawn-off Tales are little McNuggets of pure gold. This is writing at its best.

Graham Rawle

Previous review quote:  David Gaffney writes truly 21st century stories for a fragmented and fragmenting world; they’re short, snappy and utterly addictive and they should be required reading for anybody trying to make sense of Britain in 2006; or for anybody in a bus queue with five minutes to spare.

Ian McMillan

Previous review quote:  Funny, pointed, and sometimes even disturbing, Gaffney’s stories deserve to be read.

Jim Burns
Ambit

Previous review quote:  Gaffney’s book will knock you out. Packed with emotion, annoyance, and social science fiction, its a testament to imagination and the skill of illustrating it.

Harlan Levey
Modart

Previous review quote:  Gaffney has produced the kind of book that makes you wish you spent more time locked in your imagination and less time dismissing irreverent thoughts. There’s a parochial quality to this work that gives off a humble warm glow. Set in Woolworths, barber shops, and offices, Gaffney looks at relationships and his characters are all a little lost and tinged with pathos but surreally optimistic. Each story has a quirky end which make you wish Gaffney was allowed 15 minutes of time with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to make his vision come to life.

Lianne Steinberg
The Big Issue

Previous review quote:  Reality becomes dislocated and strange and words and phrases acquire a compelling importance in these sad, funny fables. They recall evanescent moments of connection and happiness. One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.

Nicholas Clee
The Guardian