Why read The Doll's Alphabet?

Book cover of The Doll's Alphabet

Book description

Surreal, ambitious and exquisitely conceived, The Doll's Alphabet is a collection of stories in the tradition of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies - many images recur in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark. In 'Unstitching', a…

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Short story collections

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Doll's Alphabet as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Kate Cayley

Author

This book is an outlier in the sense that most of the stories dwell in the fantastic. Women shed their skins. A girl becomes hypnotized by a circle of light. An apparently ordinary vintage shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market has something unnerving in the back room.

But I love this book so much that I take every opportunity to recommend it. It’s still (in a heightened mode) expressing the deep strangeness of domestic life—what happens in the spaces we live in, what tensions or tragedies or irreconcilable conflicts result from small clashes between closely related people—in a way that seems…

From Kate's list on The best short story collections that make domestic life seem very, very weird.