Inside the House Inside - by Rosalind Goldsmith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Excluded from society, the characters in these short short stories are outcasts, cut off from each other, from their future, from their own lives or from sanity and meaning. In Rosalind Goldsmith's remarkable debut collection, cutting-edge prose, rich in compassion, captures lives lived in the margins. Homelessness, climate change, depression, anxiety, disease, or the trauma of abuse has pushed her characters beyond their limits. They survive outside the norm, living within the structures they have built within their own minds. We meet a drug-addicted woman living on the street, a boy on the run from his father; a young woman obsessed with a text message, an old woman trying to reassemble a language and a world that have both fallen apart, a woman pursued by her own life and another dancing to save hers. In concise, unflinching prose, each story is linked by visceral imagery of the contemporary world, an intense, heartbreaking world, where lives are lost to exclusion. These stories offer the raw vibrancy of clarity based on understanding and empathy.

Review Quotes

"Inside the House Inside inhabits a space somewhere between our dreams and our nightmares. Moving deftly between realism and something much stranger, these stories are uncanny and moving at once." --Kate Cayley, Author, Lent and How You Were Born

"On every level -- the phrase, sentence, story, collection -- this book vibrates with the intensity of distilled experience. The motivating core of them is love and compassion, but not those two alone. Love. Compassion. And warning." --Anne Fleming, Author, Curiosities

"This literary risk of a collection is meant for readers who want to feel things and aren't too hung up on whether or not those feelings are pleasant. It is about the brute savagery of survival." --Humber Literary Review

"Goldsmith's stories in Inside the House Inside show what life knocks out of people and how they hang on." --Emily Webber, SmokeLong Quarterly

About the Author

Rosalind's short stories have been published in over fifty journals in the US, UK, and Canada, including filling Station, Orca, Litro, Temz Review, Fairlight Books, Chiron Review, The Lincoln Review, the Bryant Literary Review, Fiction International and the Masters Review. She loves to experiment with language and form. Before writing short fiction, she wrote radio plays for CBC Radio Drama, a play for Blyth Theatre Festival and translated and adapted short stories by the Uruguayan writer Felisberto Herná ndez for CBC Radio. She's a volunteer facilitator with the Writers Collective of Canada.