CD Rose book launch at House of Books & Friends

Award-winning short story writer CD Rose will be at House of Books & Friends to launch his new short story collection, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. Described as “stunning”, the collection of 15 dreamlike tales came out on 23 January with Melville House Publishing. Delving into memory, illusion and language, through the book, CD Rose invites you to travel through time and space, and is said to be “perfect for the fans of David Mitchell, Julio Cortázar and Steven Barthelme”. The bookshop says the event will be “perfect for fans of short stories and ethereal, time-bending literary fiction”.

Here’s a bit on the book: “Welcome to the fictional universe of CD Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness—the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future. In these 15 dreamlike tales, you’ll meet a forgotten composer who enters a nostalgic dream-world while marking time in a decaying Romanian seaport; two Russian brothers, one blind and one deaf, building an intricate model town during an interminable train ride across the steppe; a journalist whose interview with an artist turns into a dizzying roundelay of memory and image. Ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language; where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.”

The author of the novels The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure and Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, CD Rose is an award-winning short-story writer. His story collection The Blind Accordionist came out in 2021. His stories have been published in the Salt anthology Best British Stories 2018 and Comma’s Parenthesis anthology, and with Gorse, The Lonely Crowd and Lighthouse magazines, among others, and he is one of the editors of the Buzzcocks-inspired anthology Love Bites (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). He’ll be discussing his work with Dr Keith Crome, interim head of of History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University.