Talking about It — Tim Parks

Collected here for the first time is the best from Tim Parks' shorter fiction, spanning his entire literary career and enriched by two new stories written for this volume. The title story of this collection, Talking about It, presents two friends, George and Michael, meeting ritually in a pub every night after a game of squash. While George recounts his increasingly extravagant sexual experiences, Michael listens on, meditating on how to redeem his uneventful life. But one day, the tables turn, and Michael finds a way to transfix his friend's attention with a very interesting story. Whether describing the simmering warfare in an Italian condominium or the problems and pleasures of adultery, these stories reveal Tim Parks' deeply felt preoccupations with the inner workings of the human psyche and the dynamics of human relations.