Short stories from an unholy marriage of Angela Carter, Sheila Heti, and H. P. Lovecraft. Dolls, sewing machines, tinned foods, mirrors, malfunctioning bodies - by constantly reinventing ways to engage with her obsessions and motifs, Camilla Grudova has built a universe that's highly imaginative, incredibly original, and absolutely discomfiting. The stories in The Doll's Alphabet are simultaneously childlike and naive, grotesque and very dark.
Camilla Grudova holds a degree in Art History and German from McGill University. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta . She currently lives in Edinburgh.
"That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams." - Guardian
"Grudova's style is an exotic cocktail: three parts magic realism, two parts dystopian, and a splash of extreme feminism. However, there is a playful intelligence driving these weird stories and a real talent that can't be dismissed - even when she seems most eccentric." - Daily Mail
"Grudova's prose is both elegant and nonchalant, offering horrific imagery as if nothing were untoward, and a feminist subtext colours almost every story." - Buzz Mag
"This doll's eye view is a total delight and surveys a world awash with shadowy wit and exquisite collisions of beauty and the grotesque." - Helen Oyeyemi, author of Boy, Snow, Bird
"Down to its most particular details, The Doll's Alphabet creates an individual world - a landscape I have never encountered before, which now feels like it was been waiting to be captured, and waiting to captivate, all along." - Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood
"Marvellous. Grudova understands that the best writing has to pull off the hardest aesthetic trick - it has to be both memorable and fleeting." - Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk