David Gaffney

Biographical note:  David Gaffney is from Manchester. He is the author of Sawn Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), Never Never (2008), ‘Buildings Crying Out’, (Lancaster litfest 2009), 23 Stops To Hull (Humber Mouth festival 2009), Destroy PowerPoint (for Edinburgh Festival, August 2009), The Poole Confessions (Poole Literature Festival 2010) and has written articles for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect magazine.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717750
ISBN:  9781844717750
Author:  David Gaffney
Title:  The Half-Life of Songs
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FA
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-10
Extent:  208pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  15 mm
Weight:  312 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Succinct in length and vast in imagination, Gaffney’s micro stories are bizarre and witty slices of condensed reality. Frequently hilarious and often poignant, they leave an after taste that is resonant, dark and clingy. They sometimes seem to glow from the inside with their own awful secrets.

Main description:  This is David Gaffney’s latest collection of micro stories. We see a world where thinking is illegal, belly dancers’ blood is used to fertilize tomato plants, pensioners in leather trousers dance to two-step garage, and an architect steals crested newts and hides them in his bath.

The stories are often beyond odd yet always ordinary, a warped backward-talking world of Lynchian surreality, allowing an emotional insight into the rich interior lives of social outsiders, the broken and the easily-breakable, perpetually on the fringes of our world.

Table of contents:
Half open

A certain type of man
Talking about Emmy-Lou
Everything’s gone turquoise
The history brush
Having it like Pontefract


Half aware

Towns in France exactly like this
Junctions one to four were never built
Buildings crying out
Everlast
The forcing of air
Live feed

Half There :

The Three Daves
Are Friends Electric?
You Would Have
I Liked Everything

Half Here:

Wooden Animals
Remaking the Moon
Do the Voice
Pathfinders
Emergency Kisses
Celia’s Mum’s Rat

Half Gone:

We are the Real Time Experiment
Delivered by Sharks
Previously Loved
The Ones we Left
Shaky Ron and the Chewing Gum Robots

Half Awake:

Double Digging
Away Day
Gelling
Candy Girl
One Thing Deeply
Don’t Thank Me Thank the Moon’s Gravitational Pull

Half Alone:

How the Taste Gets In
Desire lLnes
To Cause Amusement
Spoilt Victorian Child
Heart Keeps Holding On
Domino Bones

Half Loved:

Some World, Somewhere
The Next Best Thing
Portraits of Insane Women
Monkeys in lLove
Is Your Thought Really Necessary?

Half Whole:

The Valued Coach Driver and his Spiral Wife
Music Like ours Never Dies
The Buddy Holly Electrician
Keep Them on, Love
What You See is There
Coned
Not Static

Half Closed:

The Only Man with Fire
People who Don’t Belong
So Much Noise
The Half-Life of Songs
Come and Play in the Milky Night

View excerpt as PDF:

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Excerpt from book:  

A Certain Type of Man


The recession pushed the four barbers into reviewing their set up costs and it was Jamie who suggested they cancel the new sign, which was going to cost five hundred quid.

‘What? And leave the name of the last shop up there?’ said Steve.
‘The Lingerie Lounge?’ moaned Alf.

‘Why not?’ said Charley, who had returned with a box of doughnuts he proceeded to pass round. ‘It would be funny.’

‘After all,’ put in Steve, his mouth full of jam, ‘we are all comfortable with our sexuality, are we not?’

‘Yes,’ the four barbers said in one deep voice.

The customers of Widnes didn’t care that the new barbershop was called the Lingerie Lounge. A clipper cut and a few grunts about the football and seventies rock was all they wanted. So the four barbers went further. A number two became a two denier, those thinning on top got a peep-hole bra cut, and the bloke with the strip of hair down the centre got a thong.

‘What about we start wearing things,’ Alf said one day.

‘What sort of things?’ said Steve.

‘You know. Bras and stuff. Just on a Saturday, like. We wouldn’t want it to look weird.’

So, each Saturday the four middle-aged large-bellied ex-chemical workers wore an assortment of complicated ladies underwear over their checked shirts and jeans: slinky and rhinestone, sheer and leopard-print, whore-red and black lacey. Customers loved it and business rocketed. Ron Farrer the barber down the road couldn’t compete. He was a lone operator and it would have looked a bit odd if he took to dressing up.

It wasn’t until a man came over the bridge from Runcorn and asked if his daughter could wait while he had a four denier on the sides and a fun-fur open crotch on the top that the four barbers decided the original shop title, PJ Kelly and Partners, might be worth the extra money.

Review quote:  Loaded with potent charges, insidious and cumulative in their effects. In Gaffney’s fiction thoughts take physical form, and the material world has a surreal vitality … The stories are sometimes haunting, and sometimes comic. The Half-life is an appropriate metaphor for the lingering effect they have on the reader.

Nicholas Clee
TLS

Previous review quote:  About Sawn Off Tales:
Sad, funny fables recalling 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

Previous review quote:  About Aromabingo:
A triumph of the blurring of literary boundaries with a dose of unabashed comic bravura and honouring British writing with the awkward, self-conscious, yet jagged aplomb it so deservedly needs.

The Short Review

Previous review quote:  About Never Never:
Gaffney’s strength is creating strong characters, and this debut brims with them. With a ruthless eye and pitch-black humour, Gaffney explores a consumer culture in which exploiting the welfare system is both a necessity and an addiction, and in which hypocrisy is endemic

The Observer

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. I wish Gaffney was allowed 15 minutes of time with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to make his vision come to life.

Lianne Steinbery
The Big Issue

Previous review quote:  About Sawn Off Tales

Witty, clever, poignant, Gaffney's micro fictions work as funny routines, moving insights and illuminating character sketches.

Time Out

Previous review quote:  About Sawn off Tales:

Utterly brilliant. Hilariously demented and wonderfully succinct. David Gaffney’s Sawn-Off Tales are little McNuggets of pure gold.

Graham Rawle

Previous review quote:  About Aromabingo:

Offbeat, unsettling and yet frequently hilarious, Aromabingo is a solid step on from the accomplished Sawn Off Tales and proof that David Gaffney is one of those names to watch.

Bookmunch