Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Filthy first pages: do they make you want to read on?

Christos Tsiolkas has opened his new short story collection with a bang. But is an explicit first page likely to turn off readers?

     Tuesday 28 October 2014 - theguardian.com 

Christos Tsiolkas
Tsiolkas: grabs attention, but at what cost? Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
It takes a lot to shock the average reader these days, but Christos Tsiolkas’s collection of stories, Merciless Gods, has already raised a few eyebrows.
The collection, to be published on 1 November, is full of Tsiolkas’s trademark preoccupation with relationships, sex and family, but even regular readers of his work may find some of the prose a little too prurient for their tastes.

The first paragraph of one of the stories, The Hair of the Dog, is quite the opener, and has already attracted attention on Twitter:
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