THE MELANCHOLY OF ANATOMY by Shelley Jackson







<--{TOUCH MY HEART}-<<



"Witty, multilayered, and beautifully written : a startling and memorable collection." --Ali Smith

"These tales prance and pirouette along the edge of the surreal. Sometimes they dive directly in, to bring back a sense of elegance, rightness, and great wisdom."--Samuel R. Delany

"Shelley Jackson is one of the most poised and original talents of her generation . . . who, very playfully, very disturbingly, takes the body apart and puts it back together again, always in startlingly imaginative ways. These tales of the anatomy's ludicrous sorrows are deliciously crafted, maintaining always a fine balance between outrageous comedy and profound melancholy." --Robert Coover

"The Melancholy of Anatomy marks the debut of a voice as gutsy and original as those of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. Shelley Jackson is a surgeon of the psyche, a body philosopher, and her understanding of how dangerous it is simply to be alive is vital, heartfelt, even profound." --Bradford Morrow

"This is an incredible debut... from an extraordinary writer. Jackson's experimental nerve tempered with lyrical vision is brilliant, beautiful and rare." --Weep Magazine

"Each of her playful and disquieting fictions -- often each paragraph within each fiction -- reveals a fresh and startling sense of what story can be."--Lance Olsen, Electronic Book Review (Internet Explorer only)

"Jackson provides a new, expansive perspective on the enduring themes of the body: growth and decay, totality and loss, pleasure and pain, and a potent, all-encompassing sensuality."--Village Voice

"Jackson... erases the boundaries between body and self, secretion and shedding, love and loathing, enveloping the reader in a slippery, icky, fascinating world where tragedy can reside in a finger scraping, joy in a thread of bone marrow." --Village Voice "Writer on the Verge"

"I've been waiting for the next Rikki Ducornet, and here she comes, whistling around the corner as if writing stories was just a question of stringing words together on a good thick thread. But where Ducornet has an ornate, Byzantine, highfalutin, sometimes medieval shimmer to her prose, Shelley Jackson is mistress of bawd; more cockney, more Chaucer, more gobbledygook."--LA Times

"The effect of Jackson's visceral, inventive details can be gorgeous, or utterly grotesque -- as in ''Phlegm,'' which presents a world wherein the disgusting stuff is used as a social lubricant. As Jackson imagines physiology's power to shape the self, each story's strange internal logic takes on a life of its own."--New York Times

"Melancholy throbs with observations that juggle dark humor with creepily pointed understanding."--The Onion



---{READ ABOUT IT}---


Publisher's page
Anchor Books

Interview
Booksense

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Bold Type

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Iowa Review Web

Interview
Weep Magazine



------{EXCERPTS}------


Cancer

Sleep

Dildo

Hair



---{DRAWINGS AND OTHER MYSTERIES}---



The Anatomy Of The Foetus



Cancer



Sticker Series 1: Found Melancholies



Sticker Series 2: The Egg and Others