White Turtle

by Merlinda Bobis

Overview

Alternately mythic, wistful, and quirky, this short story anthology resonates with an original and confident storytelling voice. An anomalous kiss, a white turtle ferrying the dreams of the dead, a working siesta in a five-star hotel, a woman’s 12-meter hair trawling corpses from a river, and a queue of longings in Sydney: these are some of the subjects of the 23 enigmatic tales brimming with chance and hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781875559893
Publisher:	Spinifex Press
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	189
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Merlinda Bobis is a Filipino-Australian writer and performer. She has received various awards for her prose fiction, poetry, and plays, among them the Prix Italia, the Australian Writers’ Guild Award, and the Philippine National Book Award. Her books include Fish-Hair Woman, The Solemn Lantern Maker, and Summer Was a Fast Train Without Terminals. She is also a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Editorial Reviews

Merlinda Bobis is a superb storyteller. She can take you into the precious intimacies of her characters with such ease that you are left breathless by the rhythm, the motion, the prevailing currents with which you've entered the mood of the tale.”  —Dee Dicen Hunt, Solidarity Philippines Australia Network

“A versatile collection that brings together the creations of wide-ranging observation, a candid mind, a sympathetic heart, and a delicious sense of humor. New angles on the familiar startle and refresh the reader at every turn. A writer to watch and applaud.”  —Yasmine Gooneratne, author, The Pleasures of Conquest

“Merlinda Bobis writes like an angel. Her characters whisper to you long after they’ve told their bittersweet tales.”  —Arlene J. Chai, author, Eating Fire and Drinking Water

From the Publisher

To read Merlinda Bobis's collection of short fiction, White Turtle is to sample a riot of tastes indivisible from that other joy of the tongue—language...While her storytelling skills are undeniable, it is Bobis's empathy with her narrators that make her work so rare and satisfying. Death, desire, joy, and grief are all revealed to the reader, and not with a comfortable objectivity—all five senses are engaged, and raw to the experience... It would be hard to find a writer with more love and reverence for all the pleasures the tongue is capable of enduring.
—Ms. Magazine

Patrick