Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

by China Miéville (Author), Mieville China (Author)

New
Paperback
2016
$12.48

The multi-award-winning China Mieville has been called 'the equal of David Mitchell or Zadie Smith' (Scotland on Sunday), a writer whose 'inventiveness and precision is awesome' (Independent), and who writes with 'an imagination of immense power' (Guardian). In this extraordinary series of stories, glistening icebergs float above urban horizons; a burning stag runs wild through the city; the ruins of industry emerge unsteadily from the sea; and the abandoned generations in a decayed space-elevator look not up at the stars but down at the Earth. Ranging from portraits of childhood to chilling ghost stories, from dystopian visions to poignant evocations of uncanny love, with beautiful prose and melancholy wit, this breath-taking collection poses searching questions of what it is to be human in an unquiet world. It is a humane and unsentimental investigation of our society, our world, and ourselves.

Synopsis

The multi-award-winning China Mieville has been called 'the equal of David Mitchell or Zadie Smith' (Scotland on Sunday), a writer whose 'inventiveness and precision is awesome' (Independent), and who writes with 'an imagination of immense power' (Guardian). In this extraordinary series of stories, glistening icebergs float above urban horizons; a burning stag runs wild through the city; the ruins of industry emerge unsteadily from the sea; and the abandoned generations in a decayed space-elevator look not up at the stars but down at the Earth. Ranging from portraits of childhood to chilling ghost stories, from dystopian visions to poignant evocations of uncanny love, with beautiful prose and melancholy wit, this breath-taking collection poses searching questions of what it is to be human in an unquiet world. It is a humane and unsentimental investigation of our society, our world, and ourselves.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 448
Edition: Main Market
Publisher: Picador
Published: 02 Jun 2016
ISBN 10: 1447235002
ISBN 13: 9781447235002
Book Overview: A highly anticipated collection of short fiction from one of the most exciting and original authors writing today.

Media Reviews

You can't talk about Mieville without using the word brilliant ... The writing, never less than excellent, takes many tones throughout the 28 stories, some showy, some not. Pastiche, when present, is so skilful that it can go unnoticed. Subjects of real weight are handled with unobtrusive ease but never glibly nor diminished by facetiousness ... Fascinating, full of suggestion and implication, and beautiful. -- Ursula K. Le Guin Guardian If anyone doubted whether China Mieville had imagination to burn, proof of his indefatigable creative restlessness is to be found in this collection of short stories ... This is a bumper collection overflowing with new visions of our beautiful, terrible world. -- Claire Allfree Metro Mieville ... is gifted with an incomparable visionary imagination. In tale after tale in Three Moments of an Explosion you'll find a conceit so unusual, so disturbing, so arresting, that it takes your breath away. -- James Lovegrove Financial Times A gathering of dark nuggets of genius ... Mieville is one of our most important writers, and this collection demonstrates his versatility and powerful imagination to stunning effect. -- David Barnett Independent on Sunday [A] fearsomely intelligent collection. Daily Telegraph The master of the New Weird. Guardian Award winner Mieville (Embassytown) moves effortlessly among realism, fantasy, and surrealism ... His characters, whether ordinary witnesses to extraordinary events or lunatics operating out of inexplicable compulsions, are invariably well drawn and compelling. Above all, what the stories have in common is a sense that the world is not just strange, but stranger than we can ever really comprehend Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review) This collection fizzes with energy and experiment ... When you put the book down, the world seems a richer, deeper and more frightening place. -- Tim Martin New Statesman Horror, noir, fantasy, politics, and poetry swirl into combinations as satisfying intellectually as they are emotionally. Mieville (Railsea, 2012, etc.) has a habit of building his narratives by taking a metaphor, often about a political or social issue, and asking what would happen if it were literally true ... In less-capable hands, this method might result in mere gags or dead horses endlessly beaten. (Good thing this isn't a Mieville story, or you'd be wiping off bits of rotten horseflesh.) In Mieville's hands it ranges from clever to profound ... Bradbury meets Borges, with Lovecraft gibbering tumultuously just out of hearing Kirkus (Starred Review) The 28 stories in China Mieville's Three Moments of on Explosion ... are familiarly strange, full of eloquent monstrosity. A burning stag runs through a city, icebergs float over towns. Mieville's vision has a fragmentary force, and this mosaic text does it proud. New Scientist Mieville - twice winner of the British Fantasy Award and three times winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award - is head and shoulders above other writers in this genre. The Times There is a baroque extravagance to China Mieville's imagination that is uniquely suited to a collection of short fiction ... The rigour of his sentences, his thinking, his politics and humanity transform these set-ups from the merely eerie to the profoundly unsettling. -- Stuart Kelly Times Literary Supplement

Author Bio

China Mieville is a three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. He is the author of many books, including The City & The City, Embassytown and Perdido Street Station. He is also the author of the short story collection Looking for Jake and Other Stories, and the novellas This Census-Taker and The Last Days of New Paris. He lives and works in London.