Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love - Tapa dura

A collection of short stories from a wholly new voice – Dan Rhodes takes the sickly sweetness out of love and travels along its sour, sharp curves.

Erotic, passionate, tragic or doomed, love is above all a game of allusiveness and nuance, of fabulous grotesques and intimate loathings. In this collection, Dan Rhodes takes fables and spins them into suburban romances, twists domestic cosiness into mythical combat. Love for a Vietnamese cellist drives a man to transform himself into her cello; love is found on a council refuse site between an unnamed narrator and the ghostly Maria; the love of The Artist for his female muse consumes him, the search party sent to find him, the villagers who discover his mouldering body – all eaten by the small creatures of the forest. Against a backdrop reminiscent of Angela Carter with a sense of the emotionally horrid that would quieten even Will Self, Dan Rhodes has produced a spellbinding, haunting collection of timeless tales.

In Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love Rhodes follows his widely praised debut Anthropology with another revelation os the surreal mysteries of love, its knots of emotional complexity and shards of sudden anguish. His inspiration is clear: Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love is a homage to classic folk-tales, to apssions from deep in the forest, to the brothers Grimm. Each story is told with sparse, exact precision. Not a word is wasted, not a nuance spared. a variety of unexpected musical instruments and strangely beautiful women compete in love's battles in a painfully comic collection. Rhodes has been compared to Raymond Queneau and described memorably 'as the bastard love-child of macabre cartoonist Edward Gorey and surreal Scottish poet Ivor Cutler.'