A Cupboardful of Shoes

“A master of the form.

A. Colin Wright’s new collection is highly anticipated!”

“I’m a librarian and I kissed a film star once. I touched her nipples too. At least, I think I did.” 

So begins “Queen’s Grill,” the second story in this collection. Horatio Humphries (one of several “unreliable narrators”) strikes up a brief friendship with a movie star on a rough Atlantic crossing, but his “twin” brother doesn’t believe him—particularly when Horatio claims she visited him the following night .

The title story, “A Cupboardful of Shoes,” is told by a woman,  but others have male or universal narrators, with either a third-person or first-person viewpoint—except for “Distantly from Gardens,” whose subject demands the use of the second. The most “experimental” story, this is a variant on the theme of the “double” found often in Russian literature, presenting a man with a split personality, inhabited by two narrators representing different periods in his own life. In “A Pregnant Woman with Parcels at Brock and Bagot,” an unnamed woman may or may not have an affair with a man she met at a party—depending on whether she can get by a woman in front of her. The collection concludes with a novella, “The Comedy of Doctor Foster,” based on Goethe’s “Faust.”

Other stories, all literary fiction, explore subjects as wide-ranging as love, violence, sex and war, sometimes with an underlying religious theme, while “The President Reminisces” is satirical. Some are told in the present tense, some in the past—serving to illustrate the author’s eclectic style and literary interests. They are set in North America and those European countries the author knows well from his fluency in six languages while living in Canada. Most have been published in literary journals