Author(s): Angela Meyer

Short Stories

Short, intense and mesmerizing. Read these very short stories on a train, a tram, a bus, or waiting in the check out line. Captives by Angela Meyer will fit into your pocket, your handbag or tucked into the cover of your ipad. Captives opens with a husband pointing his gun at his wife. There's a woman who hears 'the hiss of Beelzebub behind people's voices', a photographer who captures the desire to suicide, a man locked in a toilet who may never get out, a couple who grow young, and a prisoner who learns to swallow like a python. Movie stars appear throughout reminding us that people live on through images: Paul Newman, Anthony Perkins, Divine, and a girl who died in a car crash are all caught eternally on film. There's a touch of Annie Proulx in these stories, the way a lonely death can creep up on you and the way our sexuality will not be denied, though we may try to cover it up. There are many glimpses of ordinary people struggling with everyday madness in extraordinary ways 'Angela Meyer's Captives is a collection of shimmering story-wafers, each of which hovers at exactly the sweet spot of just enough. Individually piercing, Meyer's fiction-slices fit together like the best poetry does, amplifying what came before and chiming with what comes after.' - Tania Hershman, author of My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions, and The White Road And Other Stories.