Pugnacious Little Trolls

Let history know that in the ninetieth year of our habitation, the people adjacent to Angle C mounted an expedition against the peoples of Angle A and Angle B, whose chants and imprecations were a nuisance by day, and whose concupiscence disturbed our sleep by night. Let it show that we marched from the vertex of Angle C towards the hypotenuse, broke in two at the point where our territory met theirs, and set upon their people in their lechery and slumber, just as the light was increasing. Let history know also that People A and People B sued for peace, and ceded to us one third of their territories along the Euler line. Finally, let it tell that we evicted the people we found there, set up camp at the median M of the hypotenuse, brought our supplies and settlers from Angle C, and so established our civilisation in the farthest corner of our new territory. Towards the third meal there was a brief uprising. Fighters from Angle B advanced towards Point M, meeting their allies from Angle A: attacked from both sides, our settlers defended themselves with cooking pots and knives, killed some, and took others captive, whom they stripped and bound at hand and foot, beating them as the light decreased, until their groans and curses echoed through the Triangle.

In his first three short-story collections, Rob Mimpriss painstakingly mapped the unregarded lives of Welsh small-town and country-dwellers. In Pugnacious Little Trolls, he combines the skill and quiet eloquence of his earlier work with confident experimentation, with stories set among the bird-bodied harpies of Central America, among the dog-headed Cynocephali of Central Asia, among humanity’s remote descendants at the very end of the universe, and in the muddle of slag-heaps and job centres that H. G. Wells’s Country of the Blind has become. In the three stories at the heart of the collection is Tanwen, idealistic and timid, embarking on her adult life in the shadow of global warming and English nationalism.

‘Where is the Welsh short story going? Wherever Rob Mimpriss takes it.’

John O’Donoghue

‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas’

Jon Gower, Nation Cymru

‘A master of the craft… I hope that future researchers of Welsh culture do not overlook this slim volume.’

Emyr Wallace Humphreys

‘Beyond question Wales’s finest and most subtle short-story writer working today... A work of great beauty and subtle force, a fine, distinctive voice.’

Jim Perrin

‘bathed in white fire in every sense… Borges would happily own them.’

Gee Williams

About the Author

Rob Mimpriss is the author of Reasoning: Twenty Stories, For His Warriors: Thirty Stories, Prayer at the End: Twenty-Three Stories and Pugnacious Little Trolls; the editor of Dangerous Asylums, an anthology of fiction by Gee Williams, Glenda Beagan, Carys Bray and others, commissioned by the North Wales Mental Health Research Project; and a contributor to Land of Change, an anthology of Welsh radical prose forthcoming from Culture Matters, and to Brush With Fate, an anthology of short fiction by Tristan Hughes, Rachel Trezise, Nigel Jarrett and others in Arabic translation by Hala Salah Eldin Hussein. He has reviewed for New Welsh Review, published criticism of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Robert Olmstead, and translated prose by Gwenallt Jones, Angharad Tomos and Manon Steffan Ros. His translations of Morgan Llwyd, Owen Wynne Jones and Richard Hughes Williams are also published by Cockatrice. He is a Member of the Welsh Academy.

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Paperback: ISBN: 978-1912368242 | Format: 12.7×20.3cm / 5×8” | Length: 132 pages | Price: £6.99.
Ebook: ISBN: 978-1912368556 | Format: DRM-free epub | File size: 17MB | Price: £1.99.
Book Bundle: A Book of Three Birds by Morgan Llwyd, The Sleeping Bard by Ellis Wynne, 
Pugnacious Little Trolls by Rob Mimpriss | Price: £25.97 £21.00.

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