Friday 56 & #BookBeginnings: Hellgoing

For Book Beginnings:

Jane salutes you from an age where to be an aficionado is to find yourself foolishly situated in the world. Where to care a great deal about something, no matter how implicitly interesting it may be, is to come across as a kind of freak. It's interest—inordinate interest—in something seemingly arbitrary, having little to do with you or the context you inhabit.

- p. 3, from the short story "Wireless"

For Friday 56:  

The interviewer , who sounded like a sexy professor on the radio, looked like someone's mad aunt in real life. 
- p. 56, from the short story "Dogs in Clothes"

About Hellgoing: Stories by Lynn Coady: With astonishing range and depth, Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Lynn Coady gives us eight unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last.

A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy. A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress. A bride-to-be with a penchant for nocturnal bondage can’t seem to stop bashing herself up in the light of day.

Equally adept at capturing the foibles and obsessions of men and of women, compassionate in her humour yet never missing an opportunity to make her characters squirm, fascinated as much by faithlessness as by faith, Lynn Coady is quite possibly the writer who best captures what it is to be human at this particular moment in our history.