Anthropology: and a hundred other stories

101 short stories, all 101 words in length. Romance collides head-on with the comic and surreal in Dan Rhodes’s uniquely entertaining first publication.

An ingenious series of perfect miniatures of doomed love.

With incredible economy – 101 words exactly – each story, complete in itself, holds up a cracked mirror to the private peculiarities of human relationships. Meet the woman who uses cider for make-up remover; admire the lover whose field-work with Mongolian gays inspires her to sprout a handlebar moustache; wonder at the caring mother who binds her baby’s feet under the misapprehension that he’s a girl. Comic monologue meets the discipline of the sonnet writer, filtered by an imagination to rival Lewis Carroll.

Sometimes violent, often hilarious, and always surprising, you will not read a more original book this year.