Vertigo
by Joanna Walsh
And Other Stories 2016
128 pages
14×21 cm
As every woman emerges and every story is told, the calm surfaces of Vertigo shatter, pulling us deep into the panic that underlies everyday life.
Vertigo is a collection of short stories focusing all on the same woman. Through various disorienting experiences — traveling abroad, discovering her husband’s dalliances, awaiting news in a children’s hospital — she observes her own behavior, and that of others, from a critical distance. She is acutely aware of everyday emptiness — the gaps between people, between logic and emotion, between truth and assumption — and of her body, a body that is aging. Through the stories we can see her as a wife, an ex-wife, a mother, a daughter, a mistress. Perspectives shift.
Vertigo’s chapters connect to give not an entire story but hints and impressions of this woman’s personality, relationships and her understanding of and position in the world. Walsh’s protagonist embodies the most bewildering aspects of womanhood. In these stories, the narrator approaches the suppressed state of panic coursing beneath things that are normally tamed by our blunted perceptions of ordinary life.
Beautifully simple and unembellished, Walsh’s writing is cleverly revealing of her protagonist’s unique and sensitive personality.
“Vertigo is the sense that if I fall I will fall not toward the earth but into space. I sense no anchorage.”
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Press:
«Walsh is a sublimely elegant writer… Vertigo is artful, intelligent – and elegant above all else.»
The New Statesman
«Profoundly affecting.»
Alex Preston, The Guardian
Rights available in a selection of countries
Represented in collaboration with And Other Stories
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word’s End and Break*up she also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers” and currently runs @noentry_arts.
