Fetish Lives
by Gail Jones

Hardcover, 178 pages

ISBN-13: 978-0807614402
$22.00 (Can $25.00)

In this arresting and richly imaginative collection of twelve stories, Gail Jones explores the role of obsession---the inescapable loves and torments she calls fetishes---in the lives of both the famous and ordinary. Structured around a series of lyrical echoes and repeated images, her stories weave fact and speculation to recreate little-known events in the lives of such figures as Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, and Elvis Presley that may have motivated their art and obsessed them as individuals. In giving life back to those long dead and to some who never lived at all, Jones does not sentimentalize the moments she imagines. Instead, she works as part psychologist, past conjurer, part biographer, creating fascinating miniature portraits.