TEN ACCEPTABLE ACTS OF ARSON, and other very short stories

Jack Remiel Cottrell

RRP:
$29.99

ISBN:
9781988503257

Publication date:
5 August 2021

Canterbury University Press

MEDIA RELEASE
10 August 2021

TEN ACCEPTABLE ACTS OF ARSON, and other very short stories, by Jack Remiel Cottrell

Never go drinking using your passport for ID. Make sure to apply lidocaine before ripping out your toenails. Magic might be real, but it never fixes the worst of your problems. Try to fall in love with bastards. You or someone you know may be gayer than previously thought. We’re not going to make it to Mars. A locked psychiatric ward needs more books than a single copy of Jane Eyre. Asking time travellers for advice on your exams is considered cheating. It’s not just human houses that become haunted. The key message is this: Life in the early 21st century is often very strange. So are these stories.

With a crisp insouciance and gliding charm, Jack Cottrell’s fiery, fey, and finely-tuned fictions leap from sci-fi to fantasy, comedy to horror, literary realism to romance, and to hybrids of all of these. Sport, friendship, love, health, family, climate change, artificial intelligence, desire, magic, Greek gods, ghosts, peanut butter, cyber pranks, racial prejudice, and creepy medical advances – these stories play with the allure of the past, the disturbances of our own times, and the dangerous idealism of our future technologies – each one in fewer than 300 words.

Canterbury University Press publisher Catherine Montgomery says 'this is an exciting new addition to our flash fiction list. Jack is a fresh, urgent new voice and we are so pleased to be publishing his work.'

Jack Remiel Cottrell (Ngāti Rangi) grew up in Wellington and now lives in Auckland. His flash fiction collection was awarded the Wallace Prize for best manuscript in the University of Auckland Master of Creative Writing class of 2020. He has been published in numerous anthologies and online magazines. Jack won the Flash Frontier Winter Writing Award in 2020, was shortlisted for a Sir Julius Vogel Award, and was runner-up in the Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-flash in 2018. His novella-in-flash, Latter Day Saints, was published in 2018 by Ad Hoc Press. When he's not writing, Jack is a volunteer rugby referee.

For review copies, interviews, cover images, author photographs, and other media enquiries, please contact Josie Shapiro on ph. 02102650686 e-josieshapiro@outlook.com

For other enquiries please contact Canterbury University Press on ph. 03 369 3372 e-universitypress@canterbury.ac.nz

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