Attrib.: And Other Stories

A GRANTA BEST YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST 2023 WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2018 ‘The real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing’ MAX PORTER 'She has arrived in a class of her own' SARAH PERRY 'Funny, playful and utterly bravura' MELISSA HARRISON The thrillingly original, word-of mouth hit short story collection that launched the career of one of our most acclaimed writers, Eley Williams. Attrib. and Other Stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. The stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. They celebrate the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to ‘ own ’ their words, tell tall tales and define their worlds, all while struggling against our innate inability to communicate exactly what we mean. With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose and a unique combination of intimate storytelling and dizzying formal daring it’s no wonder that Attrib. and Other Stories brilliantly announced the arrival of one of Britain's most loved and most original writers. 'You feel in the safe hands of a storyteller dedicating their talent to our pleasure' OBSERVER 'One of the most promising young British writers to emerge in the past few years' FINANCIAL TIMES

About the Author :
Eley Williams' collection of fiction Attrib. and Other Stories (2017) was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her novel The Liar's Dictionary won a 2021 Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and listed as a Guardian Book of the Year. Her writing is published in journals and anthologies including Modern Queer Poets, The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story edited by Philip Hensher, and Liberating the Canon edited by Isabel Waidner, with stories and serialised fiction also commissioned by Radio 4. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Review :
‘A writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent 'A book that says something about how it feels to be human, among the uncertainties of the twenty-first century … exhilarating' Guardian 'It's exhilarating to dive into the associative rush of Williams's writing' Vanity Fair 'It is impossible not to identify with Williams's candid observations of the quirks and quandaries of emotional life’ Times Literary Supplement 'You feel in the safe hands of a storyteller dedicating their talent to our pleasure' Observer 'Funny, playful and utterly bravura' Melissa Harrison, author of By Ash, Oak and Thorn 'One of the most promising young British writers to emerge in the past few years' Financial Times 'There's no one working in the UK quite like her' Joanna Walsh 'An emotionally delicate and tenderly introspective collection' New Statesman 'Funny, playful and utterly bravura' Melissa Harrison, Financial Times 'The real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing' Max Porter, author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers 'It proved you can generate acrobatic, edge-of-your-seat fiction, from little more than random arcana' The Telegraph 'Attrib. And Other Stories cornered the market in cerebral playfulness' Guardian ‘I came late to Eley Williams and am happy to have found her. Hearing her read her short story ‘Smote’ aloud recently blew me away’ Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under 'Think William Gass, Lydia Davis or Anne Carson, and you won't be too wrong' Michael Hoffmann, London Review of Books ‘Wondrous things, shots of linguistic pleasure that take moments of everyday life and fashion something marvellous from them’ Times Literary Supplement