Reasoning: Twenty Stories is the first of a series of three collections by Rob Mimpriss, followed by For His Warriors and Prayer at the End.
As a man he would suffer for his life, and other people would suffer. He would learn to live watchfully, quick to advantage and flight. Over time he would see that others were like him, not always unhappy, not always alone, but carrying also this life inside them, ravenous and afraid.
An old man tries to assess his own guilt in the marriage his teenage daughter has destroyed. A young man tries to understand why, in the same family, he should be both hated and loved. A seventeenth-century Puritan preacher and a Cardiff woman facing divorce unite in their call to 'know your innermost heart, ' while a Romanian dissident under Ceausescu and a Welsh-language activist find themselves outwardly liberated but inwardly still in chains.
The style of the stories is deeply traditional, their content unsettlingly modern. In the same way, life in rural Wales is troubled by events taking place in the outside world. A strong historic awareness and a restlessly questing conscience suggest a writer less concerned with making his mark than with understanding what it means to inherit a Christian and Western heritage at the start of the twenty-first century.
'Through the stealthy movements of his prose, Rob Mimpriss enacts the quiet enigma of people's lives and relationships. The result is an understated fiction of compelling intensity.' Prof M Wynn Thomas
'A quiet writer with a loud voice... I'll be listening for more.' Michael Nobbs, gwales.com
'Whilst the publication dates of Rob Mimpriss' three short story collections span a decade - from 2005 to 2015 - the fluency between volumes belies this interval. Reasoning, For His Warriors and Prayer at the End are dark, dense reads. This Welsh writer has a practised confidence, and each of his seventy-three stories collected here is marked by an indelibly bleak angle into society.' Sophie Baggott, New Welsh Review
About the Author:
Rob Mimpriss is the author of three short-story collections, Reasoning, For His Warriors and Prayer at the End, and the translator of Going South: The Stories of Richard Hughes Williams. His recent short fiction has been translated into Arabic by Hala Salah Eldin for an anthology of fiction published by Albawtaka, Cairo, and has been short-listed for the Rhys Davies Prize. He has published criticism and reviews of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Robert Olmstead and others for New Writing, New Welsh Review and elsewhere. In 2011 he was elected to Membership of the Welsh Academy, in recognition of his contributions to Welsh writing. He lives at http: //www.robmimpriss.com and in Bangor.
