Talking About it - Softcover

'Parks's short fiction confirms his credentials as an acute chronicler of midlife disillusionment' --The Guardian

'...the flatness of Park's diction and the extremities of emotion - grief, lust, anger, betrayal - that his stories describe is unnerving, almost pornographic, to read. The cumulative effect is strangely addictive, however - bathos jostling pathos in a stylised rendition of the random savagery of real life.' --The Telegraph

'This catch-all volume is clever and readable throughout' --Kirkus Review

The title story of this collection, "Talking about It," presents two friends, George and Michael, meeting ritually in a pub every night after a game of squash. While George recounts his increasingly extravagant sexual experiences, Michael listens on, meditating on how to redeem his uneventful life. But one day, the tables turn, and Michael finds a way to transfix his friend’s attention with a very interesting story.Whether describing the simmering warfare in an Italian condominium or the problems and pleasures of adultery, these stories reveal Tim Parks’s deeply felt preoccupations with the inner workings of the human psyche and the dynamics of human relations. Tim Parks is the author of eleven novels, includingJudge Savage, as well as travel memoirs, essays, and translations of Italian writers. His most recent work of nonfiction isMedici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence.