Overview

Sail Away Land is the space where we might go when we're no longer alive (sometimes only temporarily). In this uncommon and disarming collection, the characters go 'there' with or without knowing it. Maybe they have been living there all along without noticing - just like they hadn't really noticed that everyone is carrying a shiny black suitcase. These stories are about normal things - losing the people we're closest to, forgiving them, finding love and managing to hold onto it - but also about going to parties through a door in the back of a colleague's head, housebreaking in search of a sister's ghost, and asking the strangers in the kitchen to resurrect you at midnight. Like brilliant and strange anxiety dreams in prose, the stories in Sail Away Land are full of temporal weirdness, life and non-being, psychological acuity, imagination and wit, all while being effortlessly, seductively readable and incredibly moving.

Full Product Details

9781803514291

Table of Contents

Reviews

I hugely enjoyed Sail Away Land. Bizarre and disquieting... Very few, if any contemporary writers, capture the drudgery of life in capitalist society, the scourge of deferred gratification, in quite the way that Ben Pester does, the feeling of being constantly trapped inside an anxiety dream -- Sara Baume Moving deftly between corporate weirdness, the anxiety of rejection, and the warm haze of childhood memory, Sail Away Land is just how I like my short story collections: playful and particular. I feel lucky to have read it -- Saba Sams 'Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life' -- Luke Kennard 'Pester inhabits familiar spaces only to skewer them with a signature style and humour' -- Irenosen Okojie 'Ben Pester is my favourite cartographer for that zone in the soul where panic shades into true metaphysical horror' -- Tim MacGabhann 'Ben Pester's vertiginous and stunningly weird stories are acts of inversion' -- Chris Power There's a beautiful, insistent quality to these stories, a strange and lovely pull. They turn and beguile and turn again, until the reader is turned inside out. Through their strange shapes, Pester's stories reflect our own flat world with a clarity that wasn't apparent before. A singular talent with that rare gift of humour -- Dave Tynan These vivid, luminous, outrageous stories are an invitation to consider, in the brightest light, all that we might prefer to leave in the shadows -- Rebecca Perry

Moving deftly between corporate weirdness, the anxiety of rejection, and the warm haze of childhood memory, Sail Away Land is just how I like my short story collections: playful and particular. I feel lucky to have read it -- Saba Sams 'Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life' -- Luke Kennard 'Pester inhabits familiar spaces only to skewer them with a signature style and humour' -- Irenosen Okojie 'Ben Pester is my favourite cartographer for that zone in the soul where panic shades into true metaphysical horror' -- Tim MacGabhann 'Ben Pester's vertiginous and stunningly weird stories are acts of inversion' -- Chris Power

I hugely enjoyed Sail Away Land. Bizarre and disquieting... Very few, if any contemporary writers, capture the drudgery of life in capitalist society, the scourge of deferred gratification, in quite the way that Ben Pester does, the feeling of being constantly trapped inside an anxiety dream -- Sara Baume Moving deftly between corporate weirdness, the anxiety of rejection, and the warm haze of childhood memory, Sail Away Land is just how I like my short story collections: playful and particular. I feel lucky to have read it -- Saba Sams 'Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life' -- Luke Kennard 'Pester inhabits familiar spaces only to skewer them with a signature style and humour' -- Irenosen Okojie 'Ben Pester is my favourite cartographer for that zone in the soul where panic shades into true metaphysical horror' -- Tim MacGabhann 'Ben Pester's vertiginous and stunningly weird stories are acts of inversion' -- Chris Power

'Pester is a genius of capturing the vicissitudes of contemporary life' -- Luke Kennard 'Pester inhabits familiar spaces only to skewer them with a signature style and humour' -- Irenosen Okojie 'Ben Pester is my favourite cartographer for that zone in the soul where panic shades into true metaphysical horror' -- Tim MacGabhann 'Ben Pester's vertiginous and stunningly weird stories are acts of inversion' -- Chris Power

Author Information

Ben Pester is the author of the short story collection Am I in the Right Place? and the novel The Expansion Project. He lives in London.

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