My Mother Was An Upright Piano... nearly here!

Well, it's all kicking off now! I'm delighted to announce that my new collection, published May 3rd, is now available for pre-order!

A collection of 56 short fictions, here are a few lovely things I cajoled writers I greatly admire to say about it:

"Funny, fresh, lyrical.  These stories are like colorful glass lozenges holding the substance of our everyday lives, sparkled up by the unusual and wondrous."

Aimee Bender, author of Willful Creatures and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

"Tania Hershman writes with such passion and playfulness, the pain and the fear and the hope woven through her stories hits all the harder. The result is beautiful, funny and quietly devastating."

Nicola Walker, actress (Spooks, Inside Men)
 

"Tania Hershman makes immaculate tiny stories that punch ten times heavier than their weight, as if a 500 page novel had been ground up and distilled into capsule form. They are so biting and so perfect they seem to hang in the air for moments after you’ve finished reading them, like little prayers. Emotionally wrenching, funny, quirky, and full of condensed wisdom, insight and love, Hershman’s short short stories are whirring, ticking word machines waiting to explode inside you."

David Gaffney, author of Sawn-Off Tales, Aromabingo, and The Half Life of Songs

The writer Alasdair Gray once described himself as “a maker of
imagined objects.”  It strikes me that Tania Hershman needs a more
artful descriptor than ‘writer,’ too: brilliant; mysterious; not of
this earth—I adore her and I adore this book.
Marjorie Celona, author of Y

 

"Simply superb, and anything but simple, these fictions peel back the layers we build up over our lives with the sharpest of scalpels: the eye of that rare creature - a real writer."

Vanessa Gebbie, author of Words From a Glass Bubble, Storm Warning, and The Coward's Tale  

“This collection is two rich catalogs interleaved. In the first, the stories succeed precisely where their own characters fail: these deft fictions are full of (and about) the humor and heartbreak made manifest when communication fails. In the second, meaning somehow gets through, albeit not through words, but through physics, say, or music, say, or love. Together the two halves lay bare a world where speaking clearly is nothing short of heroic.”

Roy Kesey, author of Pacazo, All Over, and Nothing in the World

If you would like to pre-order, please visit my lovely publishers: Tangent Books. Also available is a special limited edition of 30 signed and numbered copies into which I will be hand-writing a brand new and unpublished 57th very short fiction! You can order one of those here and I will be doing hand exercises in preparation...