Are They Funny, are They Dead? - Tapa blanda

The ghost of Scheherazade flits though Marjorie Ann Watts collection, as her elderly characters try to ward off death in Are they funny, are they dead? . . . The feistiness of her heroines, who won t be put off, like the female patient in A Vivid Imagination or little Linny who defies God in Religious Studies , would surely have pleased the late Angela Carter. --Lesley McDowell, Financial Times

A daughter s life is changed on discovering her adoptive father is in fact her true father; in her imagination, an elderly woman removes the blue mantle from a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and is delighted to find black lace underneath; a senior academic, about to deliver a lecture to his students, is unsettled by memories of a passionate affair.

These spare, elegant, disconcerting stories swerve between the long perspectives of memory and the abrupt questions of children running free: Where does the world go when I am dead? Marjorie Ann Watts, the author of a series of books for children, brings to the ambiguities of adult relationships, and the fault-lines between generations, a rare and sharp-witted understanding of how the past remains forever embedded in the present .