Search Worlds Without End

Surreal, ambitious, and exquisitely conceived, The Doll's Alphabet is a collection of stories in the tradition of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies many images recur in stories that are in turn child-like and naive, grotesque and very dark. In "Unstitching", a feminist revolution takes place. In "Waxy", a factory worker fights to keep hold of her Man in a society where it is frowned upon to be Manless. In "Agata's Machine", two schoolgirls conjure a Pierrot and an angel in a dank attic room. In "Notes from a Spider", a half-man, half-spider finds love in a great European city. By constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has come up with a method for storytelling that is highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting.

Table of Contents:

• Unstitching
• The Mouse Queen
• The Gothic Society
• Waxy
• The Doll's Alphabet
• The Mermaid
• Agata's Machine
• Rhinoceros
• The Sad Tale of the Sconce
• Edward, Do Not Pamper the Dead
• Hungarian Sprats
• The Moth Emporium
• Notes from a Spider

Nominated for the Shirley Jackson Best Short Fiction award. This short story originally appeared in the collection The Doll's Alphabet (2017) and then in the anthology Year's Best Weird Fiction: Volume 5 (2018), edited by Michael Kelly and Robert Shearman.

Two Latin graduates are struggling after an unplanned pregnancy resulting in twins. The mother is abandoned by her husband (he accuses her of having sex with ancient pagan gods); she begins turning into a wolf every night after reading the twins their bedtime story.

Shirley Jackson award winning and BFA nominated novelette. Originally appeared in Granta 136, Summer 2016. It can be found in the anthology Year's Best Weird Fiction: Volume Four (2017), edited by Michael Kelly and Helen Marshall, as well as the collection The Doll's Alphabet (2017).

In this world, men are Men who must constantly study and take Examinations in Philosophy. A woman's existence is driven by capturing a Man which is "The Goal of Life;" she must support him working in hazardous factories, often being injured. "An outsider male who is not part of the exam system hooks up with a woman and they have a secret child and demonstrate strange, illicit tenderness in a world devoid of any." (Marc Nash)