Strictly Casual: Fiction by Women on Love by Amy Prior

Strictly Casual: Fiction by Women on Love

Amy Prior

A collection of short stories by different authors, offering a refreshing alternative to soppy romances. The stories are bittersweet, cynical, starry-eyed, and the one about necrophilia is just disturbing! Get through that story (I still had to read it!) and you'll appreciate the rest - all very different views of what love and relationships mean to women.

Extract
Oh shit, I was single. Soon I would start dating. I vaguely remembered that it involved going to movies I wouldn't ordinarily see and having intense discussions in coffee houses with bearded men. But the details were hazy. Last time I had been single I had been twenty-nine; now I was thirty three. That was a long sabbatical. Back in my pre-boyfriend era, no one had email addresses or used the word 'dot com', Princess Di still bopped around offering comfort to the dying, unaware that she would be the next to go.

Everything had changed in the last few years while I, Rip Van Winkle, had slept in the cocoon of a couple. Maybe dating practices had evolved into something I wouldn't understand; maybe people flirted using hand signals that would mystify. Were there any single men these days? I read somewhere that they all moved to Silicon Valley.

Parallels
  • Dick for a Day by Fiona Giles
  • Love Your Enemies by Nicola Barker
Buy this book Borrow this book
Violence
Explicit sexual content