Paul Magrs

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Biographical note:  Paul Magrs was born in 1969 in the North East of England. He was educated at Woodham Comprehensive, Newton Aycliffe and at Lancaster University. He studied English and Creative Writing. His first novel, ‘Marked for Life’, was published in 1996 and his most recent, ‘Hell’s Belles’ (Headline, 2009) is the next in the Brenda and Effie Gothic Mystery series. His first novel for younger readers was ‘Strange Boy’ (Simon and Schuster, 2001) and his first collection of short stories was ‘Playing Out’ (Vintage, 1997). His stories have appeared in ‘New Writing’, the Sunday Express Magazine, the TLS and broadcast on Radio 4. He lectured in English and Creative Writing at UEA for seven years, moving to Manchester to start teaching the Novel Writing MA in 2004. In 2008 he was a judge for the Portico Prize.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717200
ISBN:  9781844717200
Author:  Paul Magrs
Title:  Twelve Stories
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-09
Extent:  128pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Twelve years after Paul Magrs’ first collection, these twelve stories take their cues from glimpses of real life, but spin into tales that are fabular, funny, moving and sometimes unsettling. In carefully and gradually putting these best stories together, the author realised that they are streaked through with pathos and an urgent need to rescue and preserve people and voices before they inevitably vanish. All of these pieces are about rescuing characters, places, moments and ideas from the brink of being forgotten.

Main description:  This is Paul Magrs’ first collection of short stories for twelve years. I’ve always written them, alongside my novels. These twelve pieces all began with a moment of observation – a face, an overheard exchange of a few words, an interesting dynamic between two people glimpsed in a café. The stories all began in one of the notebooks the author take everywhere and gradually – very slowly, in some cases – worked themselves up into full-length stories.

Some of these are macabre fables, from when Paul Magrs was toying with Gothic motifs. Some are pure dirty realism, introducing us to the messy circumstances of someone’s life. Some of these stories give us a tiny sliver of ‘real time’, but there’s always that sense of a huge backstory alluded to.

These are the stories that Margs has blazed away at and tinkered with and put away carefully, after their first publication, as they bided their time for collecting up. Some of these characters are the author’s favourites: the Roman priest who takes his ex-lady friend on a trip round the Vatican supermarket; the squirrel gang of Levenshulme, lamenting the death of their most charismatic member; the boy who goes to visit a strangely-ailing talking dog on a market stall.

As with all of his writing, Margs is zig-zagging across different genres and conventions and forms – taking what he needs and what appeals to him, in order to bring to life these particular characters and their predicaments.

(These stories have appeared in The Sunday Express Magazine, Bound, North, In the Red, Metropolitan, Walking in Eternity and on BBC Radio 4.

Table of contents:
Kept Safe and Sound
Waiting On
The Foster Parents
Sunseeker
Another Go
Collecting Ada Jones
The Longsight Branch
The Girl from Victim Support
The Great Big Book Exchange
The Eyes Have It
Never The Bride
In the Sixties
Acknowledgements

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The Great Big Book Exchange


There was once a woman who loved to read.

There was once a woman whose daughter went and left home and died. Now the old woman had a house filled with paperback books, one cantankerous old man, and one orphaned grandson.

There was once a woman who lived in a small town at the top of a hill. There was a market place, two pubs, an Italian cafe .?.?. there were low, flat fields criss-crossed by railway tracks and country roads, a sandstone quarry, the old pit nearby .?.?. This was her landscape.

There was once a woman who had read so many paperbacks that she couldn't possibly remember all that she had read. So much of it leaked out of her head, under the gap at the bottom of her bedroom door, across the top landing, down the staircase?.?.?.

There was once a woman who was a dinner lady in the school her grandson had to go to now. Where he didn't fit in, because he'd slipped back a whole generation into the past. His parents had been killed in a plane crash. A holiday in Florida they'd won on a quiz show. Everyone dreams of going to America. Tickets and new luggage and kisses at Teesside airport and they were never seen again. The tape of their quiz show triumph sat by the video recorder on the stone-effect fire place. No one had ever watched it.

There was a woman who loved to sit up all night reading. She would ward off the present she was in with reading.

There was a woman who didn't remember the names of people, the order that events came in, the twists of plots. She could never remember the outcomes of who was in love and who was dead and buried or married; or who was saved and who deserved or didn't deserve their comeuppance.

There was once a woman called Winnie who knew that, even if she forgot the adventures she'd been on, or the lives she'd lived, the paperbacks were still there to prove it. This woman was measuring her life's duration in inch-thick spines.

There was a woman who believed that books, old books, had a life of their own. She believed they were independent of their owners and they floated from home to home. They rested, like pigeons taking a breather, in book shops and market stalls. She believed they sought out their rightful owners and ultimately found them.

She believed they come to us at just the right point in our lives. They wait and wait and then they ambush us. Tell us all they know.

There was a woman called Winnie who was seduced by paperbacks, one after the next.

There was a woman who went each week to breathe in the dust of the Great Big Book Exchange. She went to the shop owned by the man with two plastic arms. She went to him, even though he expected customers to eventually return the books they bought from him. He expected them to adopt his credit system and to take part in the Great Big Book Exchange. Everything swirling in a great big current, swapped hand to hand, always moving, always flowing. But she was a woman who liked to keep her own books. To keep beside her every book she ever read.

There was a woman who browsed those shelves, and couldn't help but wonder over the man in charge. She couldn't help wondering about him with his two plastic arms. As she worked her way round his shop she darted the odd look at him and, every glimpse she got of those arms, it made her flinch. And Winnnie wondered what he could do and what he could accomplish with those two smooth arms. She wondered if it was only from the elbows down that he was artificial. It was hard to tell with the sleeves of the checked shirts he favoured rolled up just so.

Pride and Prejudice. The Silence of the Lambs. Flowers in the Attic. Jaws.

She watched carefully at how he managed when he had to count out change on his counter and when he had to operate the clunky old till. Winnie stood in shame with her pile of books, her heart turning over in her chest, when he was forced to take them from her to check the scribbled prices on the inside covers. She held her shopping bag open for him, so he could drop them in. She blushed every time she came here, but she still came back.

Rich Man, Poor Man. Sophie's Choice. The Exorcist. Jane Eyre. The World is Full of Married Men.

There was a woman who couldn't help coming back again and again to the Great Big Book Exchange.

Gone with the Wind. Peyton Place. Great Expectations.

There was a woman who went out on a Saturday with her grandson, now a teenager. He was a bit old-fashioned. He didn't understand the kids in his class at school. He didn't know what they were talking about.

Brideshead. Dead Zone. Tin Drum. Dallas. Dune.

There was a woman who bemoaned her grandson's fate, but only to herself, inside her head. Poor lad. His parents dead, his grandma quiet, her head in a book, his granddad pissed and crazy. In a little town like this. Like he's too old for his generation. They like?—?what do they like??—?burgers in buns and french fries and rap music and punk music and hanging around on the street of a night. Even in this small town. They cluster around the phone box in the market square. She's seen them. Her grandson would never dream of knocking about with them.

What does he like? He likes the suety puddings and the mashed swede and the roast potatoes and jam rolly-poly she makes for him. He's heftier, more careful, slower than his peers. He's sedentary. He reads.

A Clockwork Orange. Stig of the Dump. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. Lolita.

He doesn't want a girlfriend. You don't want a girlfriend, do you? They take all your money off you. Girls your age are older than you. More mature. They'll be after all your money you've saved. Your inheritance. They'll take a lend of you. Leave you with nowt.

A Confederacy of Dunces. On the Road. The Naked Lunch. Battlestar Galactica.

There was a woman who was pleased her grandson had caught this reading bug of hers. She was glad he would come to choose books with her at the Great Big Book Exchange. Often they were the only customers in there on Saturday afternoons, making their way along their separate shelves.

They both loved the bare boards and dusty windows of the Exchange. They both loved getting off the bus and walking down the main road, where it was all fast food places and warehouse furniture stores. They both loved making their way to their favourite shop, tense with anticipation. Both knowing that the stock would have changed since the previous Saturday. In the days between, all the books would have jumped out of their homes and changed and switched about. That was why the shop was so dusty. Why the air was filled with motes of unsettled dirt and air and flakes of skin. Because of all the activity, the traffic, the exchanging going on. Always something new to read. Something you've never heard of. Something you always meant to read.

Previous review quote:  On Never the Bride: An original talent with a wonderful and sympathetic ear and eye for the hidden craziness of contemporary life. This book deserves to be widely read, enjoyed and garlanded with praise

Shena Mackay

Previous review quote:  I love Paul Magrs, he’s a great novelist, clever and ironic.

Russell T. Davies
SFX Magazine, 2007

Previous review quote:  On Does it Show?: Magrs’s characters have the courage to make themselves believe there is still magic in the world.

The Times, 1997