Neil Campbell

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Biographical note:  A graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Manchester Metropolitan University. First book of stories, Broken Doll, published by Salt in 2007. A chapbook of poems, Birds, published by Knives Forks and Spoons in 2010. A short story, Barren Clough, in the RSPB anthology, Murmurations, edited by Nicholas Royle, 2011. Chapbook of poems, Bugsworth Diary, published by Knives Forks and Spoons 2011. A PHD student (studying short stories) at Northumbria University. Born in Manchester, now lives in a cottage in the Northumberland countryside.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718306
ISBN:  9781844718306
Author:  Neil Campbell
Title:  Pictures from Hopper
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FA
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Dec-11
Extent:  168pp
Height:  203 mm
Width:  127 mm
Thickness:  10 mm
Weight:  252 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:  Short stories and flash fictions inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. Works in the tradition of American greats of the short story like Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Andre Dubus, Richard Ford, but also embraces flash fiction. A multiplicity of short fiction styles.

Main description:  Neil Campbell's new collection of short stories draws upon the work of American painter Edward Hopper. Many of the stories are directly inspired by the visual stimuli of a painting, some combine the influence of several different works and some simply use the titles of paintings as starting points.

In his wide-ranging second full-length collection of fiction, Campbell writes stories about love, sex, death, art, adultery, the media, marriage, suburban violence, consumerism, childhood, suicide, loneliness, music, mountains, wildflowers, birds, football, alcoholism, prostitution, obsession, incarceration, sociopaths, and laughter.

Campbell brings to life a mythical America, packed with images of gas stations, hotel rooms, lighthouses, diners, boardwalks, boarding houses, cinemas, offices at night, railroads, freight trains and sunlight by the sea, written from the perspectives of both men and women, in locations as diverse as the American Midwest, New York, Los Angeles, Texas, New Jersey and San Francisco, as well as Brazil, Manchester, Middlesbrough, The Peak District and The Isle of Arran.

Table of contents:
Cars and Rocks
Texas Wildflowers
The Light on Ocean Avenue
Pictures from Hopper
Pictures from Hopper #2
Pictures from Hopper #3
Pictures from Hopper #4
Vigilante Man
Arran Song
City Sunlight
Angels Flight
Nighthawks
Eagle on a Cactus
Teenage Songs
Why I Don’t Have Love
Oasis
Waving Their Scarves at the Sky
Piccadilly Gardens
Bar
Room
Flat
Sun on Prospect Street
Evening Wind
Acknowledgements

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Excerpt from book:  

Cars and Rocks

I lived above Larry Flynt’s on Broadway, just across from a bar called Vesuvio’s. I could see it from the window of my apartment, and at night if I looked at the sidewalk under me I could also see down the tops of $50 hookers. I’m originally from a family of farmers in Salinas, and I got the Greyhound over to the city for a bit more life than you can get out of a hundred square miles of cabbage patch.

I worked afternoons in Vesuvio’s, pulling pale ales for the tourists tired of sea lions and trams. When I wasn’t busy I looked out of the window at the workers trailing up and down Columbus, saw their dumb faces, and knew I always hated that shirt-and-tie jive.

A guy who used to come in regular was the least famous in a family of actors, the son of one of the greatest actors in American cinema. He worked bit parts in the movies, mostly did theatre. Last time I saw him he was doing a Sam Shepard play at the Magic, and he used to come in to wash down tequilas with beer.

I was cleaning shot glasses, not looking at him, when I heard him stop in mid-flow. I looked up and could see his face backing away from me. The stool landed with a bang and his head cracked on the floor. If we’d had cameras I could have watched it again. Half an hour after the ambulance had taken him, twenty-five women from an institute in Copenhagen came in, most of them wanting pale ales.

I met Alba on Rexroth and bought her some Corso in City Lights. With that and a Guinness or two in Specs she seemed to be getting in the mood. That changed when she saw the hole I was living in: the junkies’ needles on the stairs, the paint-stripped door, the mess inside. I’d change the sheets only when they started to stink, I’d wipe dust when it got me to coughing. The bathroom I don’t want to tell you about. So she asked me to walk her home, all the way up Russian Hill. Flat she shared with someone else I didn’t know about then. Nice view up there after the fog: the boats in the bay, the bridges Bay and Golden Gate, the hills of Marin County. I stood in the doorway, kissed her, and she went in and I was left looking at the Golden Gate twinkling its way to Sausalito.

Alba was from Champaign, Illinois, and looked like a young Diana Ross. She always wore hats, beautiful hats, red, green, black. Put them on the bed. Did lots of drugs, got me down that road. She wore skirts like belts and boots up to her thighs and when she danced I lost the name of days.

Now I don’t know if craziness always comes with beauty. I mean, I’m a good looking guy, or I was. Think Cool Hand Luke, only with eyes more blue. Not really. I was more like George Kennedy, big burly mother going bald. But with beauty there’s all that envy, none of the girls like you, whatever way you look people think that you think you’re better.

She liked me for the poetry. She wrote it too, in a way of speaking. One time we saw Ginsberg and Burroughs, another time Baraka at a bookshop on Irving. But you couldn’t expect a poem to write one. She loved it though, and we’d walk around North Beach, sit in the park near the church, lay down on the grass in the summer. Sometimes we’d float stoned in the mornings, see the Chinese doing Tai Chi in the fog.

One day in Golden Gate Park, a man in a top hat went by on silver stilts. He carried a golden radio with an aerial going way up into the purple sky. Sea lions came wriggling through the grass and watched as we made our way through sparkling candy stars.

Alba told me her daddy used to pistol-whip her and slash at her legs with whipcord. She said he put her mother’s head through the window and slit her fingers with slivers of glass. She told me her daddy used to rumble in and unbuckle his pants but not to hit her. I didn’t swallow any of that windy city bullshit until I felt the welts on her legs and it made me shiver with visions. Sometimes when we made it she whimpered his name and I went at it harder to shut her up. One time right there she said she was going to kill me. She was profiled with the sun through the window and light steamed off her. She slid a fingernail across my throat like a cutlass.

Unpublished endorsement:  A vital short story writer, in touch with people and the natural and constructed worlds around us.

Nicholas Royle

Unpublished endorsement:  Each of these stories frames the world in the fine detail of its own perspective, and then goes on to find its place in Neil Campbell's understated but penetrating vision.

Michael Cawood Green

Unpublished endorsement:  Pared back but peppered with beautiful language, Neil Campbell’s stories are peopled with the destitute of spirit, looking for another – any other – for comfort. Rough and spiky men and women pair up and break up, they fight and they plead. These are stories not of love but of need and they ache with truth; they are as eerie and lonely as any Hopper painting.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir