SHAPES FOUND FOR LIVING by Nick Norton

Books in dreams were once made of scrolls and parchments. Once, books in dreams could only manifest themselves as clay. Scratches became meaningful. Books still tumble down. Most rooms are flooded; the waters are generally at ankle height.

Shapes Found for Living offers short tales—rumours and fables coalescing  from the uneven experience of living in this century and vivifying the reader’s imagined memory theatre. The collection moves from rude immediacy via questioning forms of language depicting unstable mental states, the near madness of trying to live or love,  to the absurd remnants of an (envisioned) ancestral recall.

‘From edible aphoristic confections to Punch and Judy sausage satire, Norton is extraordinarily adept when it comes to framing his imagination. Each story is like a cosmic X-ray revealing the contents of an incredibly lively mind, brought to earth and capturing the swirl of his mind at play. This is not so much a collection as a mesh eloping.’
–> Rachel Genn

‘This book reads like a waking dream in which some of my most cherished obsessions—animals, paths, woven things—take on ever-changing, vaguely threatening forms. Beginning with a series of fifty-two gloriously inconclusive endings, it goes on to wrong-foot its reader in every aphoristic and elliptical ‘puddle of plenty nothing’. A string of sausages is transformed into a string of sentences, wherein call centre workers on zero-hours contracts lay bets on a tightrope walker falling. Nothing I have read in a long time approaches this entanglement of the familiar and the baffling, and nothing these sentences have touched—from rabbits to ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’—will ever look the same again.’
–> Ellen Dillon

‘My perception is altered…in a good way, that is.’
–> Patrick Keiller

Nick Norton is a writer, based in Leeds, the author of novels, short stories, and a researcher of fable-function, formulating the ‘Aesopic Body’ as a figurative manner of exploring fiction that is both critical and humorous. Building the Aesopic Body is published by SPTM! Other writings can be found in Minor Literature[s], 3:AM,  The Happy Hypocrite, Soanyway, and elsewhere. He initiated and curated the project Library Interventions, from 2013 to 2020, enabling artists, writers, and performers to enact the creative potential of research.