Vertigo

‘Less a collection of linked short stories – though it is that, too – than a cinematic montage, a collection of photographs, or a series of sketches, Walsh's book would be dreamlike if it weren’t so deliciously sharp . . . With wry humour and profound sensitivity, Walsh takes what is mundane and transforms it into something otherworldly with sentences that can make your heart stop. A feat of language.’

* Kirkus *

‘Reading Vertigo has opened even wider my conceptions of what’s possible in fiction — how a book can be like a series of photographs, like cinema. These stories appear as much as they engage with narrative, saturated with a calm yet rich colour.’

-- Amina Cain

'Joanna Walsh’s haunting and unforgettable stories enact a literal vertigo by probing the spaces between things . . . Her narrator approaches the suppressed state of panic coursing beneath things that are normally tamed by our blunted perceptions of ordinary life. Vertigo is an original and breathtaking book.'

-- Chris Kraus (author of I Love Dick)

‘Think Renata Adler's Speedboat with a faster engine . . . Vertigo reads with the exhilarating speed and concentrated force of a poetry collection. Each word seems carefully weighed and prodded for sound, taste, touch . . . The stories are delicate, but they leave a strong impression, a lasting sense of detachment colliding with feeling, a heady destabilization.’

-- Steph Cha * Los Angeles Times *

‘Her stories reveal a psychological landscape lightly spooked by loneliness, jealousy and alienation.’

* The New York Times *

'Vertigo is a funny, absurd collection of stories.'

-- Maddie Crum * The Huffington Post *

‘Her writing sways between the tense and the absurd, as if it’s hovering between this world and another . . . Vertigo may redistribute the possibilities of contemporary fiction, especially if it meets with the wider audience her work demands.’

-- Jonathon Sturgeon * Flavorwire *

‘This collection makes the familiar alien, breaking down and remaking quotidian situations, and in the process turning them into gripping literature.’

* Vol. 1 Brooklyn *

‘Moments of blazing perspicacity, creativity, intelligence, and dark humour are insanely abundant in [Walsh’s] writing.’

-- Natalie Helberg * Numéro Cinq *

‘If anyone in the course of reviewing Vertigo refers to Joanna Walsh as a “woman writer” or says the book is about women, relationships, or mothering, I will send an avenging batibat to infiltrate his dreams because that would be like saying Waiting for Godot is about a bromance . . . No, this book is about how embarrassing it is to be alive, how each of us is continually barred from our self . . . Vertigo is a writer’s coup, an overthrow of everyday language . . . It feels so good to see Walsh jam open the lexicon – and with such dry wit. . . . No one else has her particular copy of the dictionary.’

-- Darcie Dennigan * The Rumpus *

‘Walsh handles the seismic events of life—a child in intensive care, a pregnancy morphing the body—with a sort of alien bluntness and mania for category that forces her language into bizarre, thrilling new shapes. A mind-blowing must-read.’

* Left Bank Books (Staff Pick) *

‘This is fiction infused with fine imagery, charged with an electric current, shockingly alive to new possibilities of rendering the mundane exquisite.’

* Roughghosts *

‘Joanna Walsh is an expert at breathing life into a possibility without forcing it to move.’

* Heavy Feather *

‘Walsh’s prose is simple but stunning in its precision. Her stories examine the minutiae of women’s experience, the experiences language often passes over too quickly, too dismissively.’

* Music and Literature *

‘The stories [in Vertigo] hum together, evoking consciousness—consciousness’s anxieties, desires, its imaginative consolations.’

* Biblioklept *

‘There’s a beautiful balance in Walsh’s writing: it’s not showy but has a quiet style; it often raises a smile but one accompanied by melancholy eyes; it’s built from the quotidian material of unremarkable life, but insists we pause and look a little closer. I was tempted to quote the wonderful final paragraph from the final story, ‘Drowning’, but instead I would suggest you read it as intended, as the last words in this eloquent volume.’

* 1st Reading *

‘Clear, lyrical prose.’

* Paper Magazi