Stories
by Heather O'Neill
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Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2015
368 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Inventive, outlandish, and tender fairy tales from a bestselling author.
The fantastic has always been at the edges of Heather O'Neill's work. In her bestselling novels Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she transformed the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. She described the smallest of things - a stray cat or a second-hand coat - with an intensity that made them otherworldly.
In Daydreams of Angels, O'Neill's first collection of short stories, she gives free rein to her imaginative gifts. In "The Ugly Ducklings," generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In "Dear Piglet," a teenaged cult follower writes a letter to explain the motivation behind her crime. And in another tale, a grandmother reveals where babies come from: the beach, where young mothers-to-be hunt for infants in the surf. Each of these beguiling stories twists the beloved narratives of childhood- - fairy tales, storybooks, Bible stories - to uncover the deepest truths of family life.
"O'Neill is at her best in the longer stories and the ones more grounded in reality, where she has a chance to develop her characters and explore their darkness." - Publishers Weekly
"Keep this collection on the nightstand, and you'll be sure to kick your dreamscape up a notch." - Kirkus
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Heather O'Neill is a contributor to This American Life, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Her novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, an international bestseller, won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Canada Reads competition in 2007; was short-listed for six prizes, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Literary Award; and was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, was short-listed for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She lives in Montreal, Canada.
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