Anthropology: and a hundred other stories

by Dan Rhodes (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.27

  101 short stories, all 101 words in length. Romance collides head-on with the comic and surreal in Dan Rhodes's uniquely entertaining first publication. An ingenious series of perfect miniatures of doomed love. With incredible economy -- 101 words exactly -- each story, complete in itself, holds up a cracked mirror to the private peculiarities of human relationships. Meet the woman who uses cider for make-up remover; admire the lover whose field-work with Mongolian gays inspires her to sprout a handlebar moustache; wonder at the caring mother who binds her baby's feet under the misapprehension that he's a girl. Comic monologue meets the discipline of the sonnet writer, filtered by an imagination to rival Lewis Carroll. Sometimes violent, often hilarious, and always surprising, you will not read a more original book this year.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.27

  101 LOVERS. 101 STORIES. Anthropology. I loved an anthropologist. She went to Mongolia to study the gays. At first she kept their culture at arm's length, but eventually she decided that her fieldwork would benefit from assimilation. She worked hard to become as much like them as possible, and gradually she was accepted. After a while she ended our romance by letter. It breaks my heart to think of her herding those yaks in the freezing hills, the peak of her leather cap shielding her eyes from the driving wind, her wrist dangling away, and nothing but a handlebar moustache to keep her top lip warm.