‘Every story is like a sky rocket we haven’t seen before – flaring and sparkling in unexpected ways.’ ~ Lloyd Jones

—

Recently, I shared my reading enthusiasm for Frankie McMillan’s My Mother and the Hungarians (Canterbury University Press, 2016.)

So I’m thrilled to learn that Frankie’s latest work, The Father of Octopus Wrestling, is due for release very soon, on Saturday 31 August. I shall definitely be heading along. 🙂

This will also be a collection of connected flash fiction, similar to My Mother and the Hungarians, and is again being published by Canterbury University Press, under the Ilam Press imprint.

If you’re a Christchurch resident or happen to be visiting that weekend, details of the launch are as follows:

Date: Saturday 31 August 2019

Time: 4 pm for a 4.30 pm start

Venue: Scorpio Bookshop, BNZ Centre, 120 Hereford Street, Christchurch

The book will be launched by Tracy Farr.

Isn’t the quote from Lloyd Jones, above, wonderful? Here’s a little more from the CUP website:

“Darkly comic, surreal and full of perceptiveness about human vulnerability and eccentricity, Frankie McMillan’s small fictions often duck and dive away from the reader’s expectations.

With a poet’s sense of how single words or phrases ripple out with alternate meanings, and a dramatist’s feeling for how apparently small gestures reveal character, and how sudden, cataclysmic change can wrench us out of comfort, routine and unthinking assumptions, the author leaves us ransacking the language for finer genre definitions.

This collection teems with both the animal world and a vivid circus of quirky human individuals. The pieces globe-trot all over the planet: from Russia to America to New Zealand; and yet often their piquant wisdom comes from how they bear down into ‘micro-geography’ of intimate relationships: the troughs, peaks, cliff-sides, the warm, still pools of recognition.

Frankie McMillan is like a quietly outrageous Zen master, showing us human folly and idiocy, steering us carefully over the dark river of vulnerability that swells under it all.”

I’ll see those of you who can make it on the 31st! Otherwise, support literature: buy the book or read it through your nearest library — get them to order it if need be. 🙂