6.00 for 6.30, Thursday 13 June, Takk café, Tariff street, Manchester

In addition to short readings from both authors there will be a unique spoken word DJ set by Monkeys In Love, and drinks supplied by the amazing Barefoot Wines.

‘Evanescent moments of connection and happiness. One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.’  The Guardian

In his fourth collection of short stories, David Gaffney reprises the format of his critically acclaimed Sawn-Off Tales; a brand-new set of pieces exactly 150 words long, each aiming to contain the breadth and depth of an epic. In stories that are laugh-out-loud funny, cringingly weird and desperately sad, Gaffney introduces the possibility of momentary actions that change everything; a swimming man sees a hundred glass eyes at the bottom of a river; a broken vase causes a couple to re-examine their place in the universe; a zoo with only three animals makes a man reconsider the value of everything; and a comedian decides to express himself through the medium of smell. Relationships begin, stutter, then crash to earth, each mundane transaction peeling away the everyday to reveal a canyon of emotion. An expert miniaturist with the ability to stuff an elephant inside a flea.

‘A writer who relishes every sentence, and gives it moral weight, and yet still manages to come up with a page-turner.’ Prospect Magazine

Thumbnails consists of forty-eight stories short enough to fit into the nooks and crannies of our distracted lifestyles. A Portuguese naturalist loses his life’s work to Napoleon; sexual love flourishes briefly in a retirement home; a grief-stricken father searches the Australian outback for signs of an extinct lizard; Mephistopheles answers his critics and explains the real origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; a roguish life is reduced to endnotes in a biography; an Anglo- Saxon bard despairs of his vocation. Myth, social comedy, tragedy and speculative fiction follow one another in tales that vary widely in form and content – united by the task of conveying a complete narrative with the greatest possible economy.