Book - Dances and Contradances by Joanne Harris

The sarcastic stories of Dances & Contradances can be summed up in two words: malevolent and malicious. As in many of her novels, Joanne Harris uniquely combines common – even banal – situations and characters with the extraordinary and the unexpected. More than ever, the author unleashes her imagination and presents us with a lush and prodigious Pandora's box containing all that is extravagant, strangely mysterious, and perverse. From suburban witches to provocative old ladies, aged monsters, suicidal lottery winners, werewolves, dolphin-women, and erotic prop makers, these are twenty-two stories where the fantastic walks hand in hand with the mundane, the bitter with the sweet, and where the beautiful, the grotesque, the seductive, and the disturbing are always just a step away. Choose your partner, please. Dances & Contradances is Joanne Harris's first collection of short stories, which, with the mastery we have come to expect from her, manages to delight, surprise, entertain, and horrify in equal measure. Long enough to whet your appetite, and brief enough to be read in the blink of an eye, these are malicious, fun, sometimes provocative stories, but always personal and capable of revealing a side of Joanne Harris previously unknown to her readers.