Inside the House Inside
Fiction, Short Stories
- Price
- $20.95
Excluded from society, the characters in these short short stories are outcasts, cut off from each other, from their future, from their own lives or from sanity and meaning.
In Rosalind Goldsmith’s remarkable debut collection, cutting-edge prose, rich in compassion, captures lives lived in the margins.
Homelessness, climate change, depression, anxiety, disease, or the trauma of abuse has pushed her characters beyond their limits. They survive outside the norm, living within the structures they have built within their own minds. We meet a drug-addicted woman living on the street, a boy on the run from his father; a young woman obsessed with a text message, an old woman trying to reassemble a language and a world that have both fallen apart, a woman pursued by her own life and another dancing to save hers.
In concise, unflinching prose, each story is linked by visceral imagery of the contemporary world, an intense, heartbreaking world, where lives are lost to exclusion. These stories offer the raw vibrancy of clarity based on understanding and empathy.
Reviews
Variant Literature interview with Rosalind Golsmith.
“Like the characters centred in these stories, Inside the House Inside is unconventional. This literary risk of a collection is meant for readers who want to feel things and aren’t too hung up on whether or not those feelings are pleasant. It is about the brute savagery of survival. It is about the complicated haven our minds weave out of denial and delusion and hope and love after our cries for help go unanswered.” —Brittany Coy-Pinnock, Humber Literary Review
"Goldsmith’s stories in Inside the House Inside show what life knocks out of people and how they hang on." - SmokeLong Quarterly
“Inside the House Inside inhabits a space somewhere between our dreams and our nightmares. Moving deftly between realism and something much stranger, these stories are uncanny and moving at once. They excavate the basement and the attic in language at once direct and lyrical, and their brevity haunts.” —Kate Cayley, award-winning author of Lent and How You Were Born
On every level — the phrase, sentence, story, collection — this book vibrates with the intensity of distilled experience. The stories are bite-sized wonders. They explode once ingested, like you’ve swallowed whole worlds. They chart the incomprehension, loss, scarcity, insecurity, and fear that are the outcome of our world’s economic inequality and unfolding climate catastrophe. Like Kafka’s stories, they can overflow the bounds of the real to illustrate the true. Like George Saunders’, they replicate with delightful exactitude the rhythms of the character’s psyches. The motivating core of them is love and compassion, but not those two alone. Love. Compassion. And warning." —Anne Fleming, author of Giller-nominated Curiosities
Book Details
Pub Date: March 2025
Trade Paperback
170 pages
Print ISBN 9781553807261
E-book ISBN 9781553807278
5” x 8”
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