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The Secret Life of the Panda



No longer available.

The Secret Life of the Panda

by Nick Jackson
Publication Date: 12th Dec, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-907681-13-4
Paperback, 204 pages


The Secret Life of the Panda is a collection of unclassifiable stories suffused with a delicate realism so skilful it is impossible to trace the line that marks where strangeness begins. The stories encompass diverse settings and situations: revolutionaries in Cuba, a heretical naturalist in 16th Century Germany, the private worlds of those growing up and growing old in modern Britain. But in all of them Jackson captures with precise external imagery and inward observation moments of penetrating personal significance for the characters.

This subtle but exotic collection forms a menagerie of the imagination, in which the reader encounters, in an intimacy sometimes wild and sometimes captive, a variety of creatures from water fleas to oropendola birds, appearing as specimens to be anatomically examined or as totems enabling the characters to live those parts of themselves otherwise hidden.

Contents

1 Anton’s Discovery
2 Lady with an Ermine
3 The City in Flames
4 The Secret Life of the Panda
5 Paper Wraps Rock
6 Boys’ Games
7 Cut Short
8 The Rabbit Keeper
9 Flaubert’s Poison
10 The Island
11 Spadework
12 The Rope
13 Shell Fire
14 Made of Glass

About The Author

Nick Jackson has been writing for about twenty years. He has been published in the independent press in the UK and the USA. Visits to the Flea Circus, his first collection, was published by Elastic Press in 2005. He has worked as a librarian in Belize, Central America and as an adult education tutor. He currently teaches at a secure psychiatric unit and spends the rest of his time birdwatching and looking for snakes and other creeping things.

What People Say

“In romanticizing the uncanny, the fantastic and the horrific, Nick Jackson’s fiction emulates that of the great 19th century writers of suspense, Poe, Wilde and Shelley. With his unique marriage of subtlety and decadence Jackson is able to minimise the carnal horror whilst preserving the spine-tingling fear. Whether unleashing his ghosts or exorcising his demons, Jackson’s is an almost ethereal voice in a literary world of bloody over-abundance.”

Rachel Kendall, editor, ISMs Press, author of The Bride Stripped Bare

“Nick Jackson writes … with alert attention to moods and settings. … [an] impressive collection.”

Nicholas Clee, The Guardian

“At his best, Jackson reminds me of Raymond Carver – wielding a beguiling simplicity of language that is almost impossible to achieve…”

Gary McMahon

Online Reviews

- Publishers Weekly

- Fantasy Book Review

- Indi Debah

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