The author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning and Booker-shortlisted blockbuster Ducks, Newburyport returns with a rollicking new collection of satirical essays Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
This is her first essay collection..
Otherwise, the world\'s her oyster! She has written seven novels, including Sweet Desserts ( Guardian Fiction Prize) and Ducks, Newburyport (Goldsmiths Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize), and an illustrated book for adults, called Tom the Obscure .
And she never wants to be carried through a crowd on a palanquin.
She can\'t stand protocol, committees, business hours, ceremonial occasions, and filling out forms.
She fears she\'s neglected everybody she knows, and vice versa - not to mention people she doesn\'t know.
She prefers interrupting people to organising them, and cries if she doesn\'t get her way.
She is not a team player.
She\'s also distrustful, lazy, and easily hurt.
She\'s a helpless iconoclast much prone to anger.
She hates having appointments in her diary and prefers to wear the same outfit every day.
She cannot add or subtract.
She\'s lousy at remembering names.
She\'s so awkward and self-conscious that meeting strangers, or almost anyone, exhausts her.
About author(s): Here\'s the thing: Lucy Ellmann is extremely shy.
Illustrations by Diana Hope.
Early versions of some of these essays have appeared in international outlets of record, but others are brand-new and ready for your delectation.
Ingrid Bergman and Jane Austen come into it somewhere (Helen Gurley Brown was forcibly removed).
They also cover the first suggestion the internet offers when you look up the word \'women\' (spoiler: it\'s shoes) and other annoyances (some fatal) of male supremacy, the nobility of buttons, and what the rejection of tourists by Jordanian donkeys should mean for global travel (stop!).
These satirical essays jauntily tackle the obstinacy, incorrigibility, and recalcitrance of things, Laura Ingalls Wilder\'s unimpressive descriptions of the construction of bobsleds and door latches, and the way we try to stand on our own two feet, put our best foot forward, remain footloose and fancy-free, and inevitably put our foot in it.
As Yeats pointed out, Things have a lot to answer for.
The author of the Goldsmiths Prize-winning and Booker-shortlisted blockbuster Ducks, Newburyport returns with a rollicking new collection of satirical essays Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
