Stone Thrower

Marek Adam

Intelligent clothing, superhero dictators, contagion-carrying computer games, cross-species reproduction... Welcome to the strange and startling world of Adam Marek; a menagerie of futuristic technology, sinister traditions and scientifically-grounded superpowers – a place where the absurd and the mundane are not merely bedfellows, but interbreed.

Pulsing at the core of Adam Marek's much-anticipated second collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent's instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future, or grounded in the domestic here-and-now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality, only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what "ordinary" life threatens.

About the Author

Adam Marek is an award-winning short story writer. He won the 2011 Arts Foundation Short Story Fellowship, and was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. His first story collection "Instruction Manual for Swallowing" was nominated for the Frank O'Connor Prize. His stories have appeared in many magazines, including: "Prospect" and "The Sunday Times Magazine", and in many anthologies including "Lemistry", "Litmus" and "The New Uncanny" from Comma Press, "The New Hero" from Stoneskin Press, and The Best British Short Stories 2011. His second story collection, "The Stone Thrower", was published in summer 2012. Stories taken from both collections were recently featured on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Reviews

"Hits the target every time" – The Guardian

"The Stone Thrower is best viewed as a window on Marek's distinctive imagination, in which the mundane waltzes with the macabre... this bold young writer is refreshing the form" – The Financial Times

"The fragility of children is overwhelming in this collection. In stories beautiful and strange, Marek tries to build a kind of fortress against what would truly break us. This is writing as exorcism and prayer, words to dispel brutality and fate" – David Vann

"Adam Marek is one of the best things to have happened to the short story this century. His stories might be strange, delicious or haunting – but they're always compelling. Any day now the word 'Marekian' is going to enter the language. Get in on the act early. Read him now" – Alison MacLeod, Prof. of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester, short-listed for the 2011 BBC National Short Story Award

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