Description
In Jack Norman’s debut collection a terminal cancer patient is made a lifetime member of his local cricket club; a yuppie couple move from the city to a Barrier Reef town in search of life-defining hardship; an extended family reunite for a funeral in a dying outback town and a son remembers his father’s numerous, not always unsalutary, obsessions.
Set in Central and North Queensland (Tropic of Capricorn), these stories are deceptively realist Strayan dreamscapes, evoking Carver, Steinbeck, Patrick White, and David Malouf, among other masters of the fictional phantasia. With strong doses of sardonic humour, bird’s eye view compassion and banana bender bluntness, Norman gives full inner and outer life to the proverbial “Middle Australians.”
“Sleep Capricorn announces the arrival of a real new talent.” -Dr Charles Cornish-Dale (Raw Egg Nationalist)
“Jack Norman’s debut collection reveals the rich inner world of the sensitive young man. Centering itself in familial conflict and heartfelt efforts to determine what nebulous meaning is found in nostalgia. One piece deconstructs the father and son relationship, challenging the traditional mythology of the father. Norman pens the paternal shadow critically, but in all of his clear prosaic skill, still ultimately arrives at love.” -Emily K Sipiora
“There’s no getting past these stories. Norman is a real prose stylist straight from the old tradition. You’ll need to stop at all these phrases to read them again and again before you’re ready to move on.” -Alex Prestia, Editor of miniMAG
“With SLEEP CAPRICORN, Jack Norman pulls the reader through the halls of a submerged memory. Fiction and biography overlap as imprecise reflections on youth and the essence of rural Austrailia are recalled with Gass-like precision. Fathers, sons, husbands, wives, the tenacious aged, and the afflicted young—all play their part in a tangible and surreal landscape of mangrove and bitumen, which seems to ponder the frailty of its inhabitants. Norman’s stories are honest and sometimes painful. His characters struggle, and find humor in their blackest moments. Norman presents them here with a lucid sincerity that lives past the end of their stories, and calls on our own haziest dreams. We know these characters, these stubborn old men and these forgotten roadside villages; with SLEEP CAPRICORN, we are re-introduced to our own memories, as lived by another.” -Ogden Nesmer, Editor at Unreal Press
“Jack Norman’s new collection covers important ground in the interior lives of men. Hardships, grace, the burdens of work and family, the reality of failure.” -Lewis Woolston, Author of The Everlasting And Other Stories
