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Modern Times
There once was …
a woman who loved her husband’s cock so much that she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.
a man who made films without a camera, which transfixed his estranged daughter.
a couple who administered electric shocks to each other, to be reminded of what love is.
a world where you wake up one day and notice that, one by one, people are turning blue
Startling, wry, beguiling and emotionally charged – the stories in Modern Times might be reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Angela Carter and Daisy Johnson, but they are also unlike anything you’ve read before.
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a woman who loved her husband’s cock so much that she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.
a man who made films without a camera, which transfixed his estranged daughter.
a couple who administered electric shocks to each other, to be reminded of what love is.
a world where you wake up one day and notice that, one by one, people are turning blue
Startling, wry, beguiling and emotionally charged – the stories in Modern Times might be reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Angela Carter and Daisy Johnson, but they are also unlike anything you’ve read before.
Reviews
Cathy Sweeney's stories have already attracted a band of fanatical devotees, and this first collection is as marvellous as we could have hoped for. A unique imagination, a brilliant debut.
Modern Times, Cathy Sweeney's inventive debut collection, offers snapshots of an unsettling, dislocated world. Surprising and uncanny, funny and transgressive, these stories only look like distortions of reality.
I loved this collection. It vibrates with a glorious strangeness! Magnificently weird, hugely entertaining, deeply profound.
In Modern Times, Cathy Sweeney gives us fables of the present that are funny, vertiginous and melancholy.
Cathy Sweeney's work is jaw-droppingly good: inventive, funny, lush. One of the best short story writers working today.
With a crispness and clarity and weirdness unlike any other fiction being published now ... Sometimes chilling, eerily accessible - and as wickedly droll as they are horrifying ... The voice running through is lucid and bright and highly readable, each sentence stripped clean and polished ... The stories themselves, long-sweeping, succinctly told anatomies of spectral lives lived in sad rented places or loveless middle-class homes, are absolutely for this moment.
Sweeney's stories are wacky, bold, form-bending ... Reading Modern Times is a bit like being in a strange dream ... Powerful ... Daring
Terrific, eerie short stories that linger in your mind long after you have closed the book.
