Book lovers are going bananas for a North-East author’s collection of quirky short stories.
Dial M For Monkey by Adam Maxwell was launched in Newcastle this week and has garnered rave reviews from critics who have described it as a “fast and fun debut” from a “unique storyteller”.
The collection of 20 short stories, which mixes pop culture, surreal humour, and of course, monkeys, is the 29-year-old author’s first book.
Adam, of Front Street, Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, Northumberland, graduated from Northumbria University with a Masters Degree is Creative Writing in 2005 and has had short stories published online for several years.
The author, who also works as a web designer, originally comes from Sunderland and said writing for the internet helped him developed his punchy, fast-paced style.
He said: “Having a book published has been a long-held ambition, which has suddenly come to fruition. I started out writing for my own website and got a great response with about 2,000 visitors a month. Writing for the internet taught me about grabbing the reader’s attention in the first couple of lines and keeping the momentum going all the way through the story. It’s the reason lots of my stories are very short.
“As far as ideas go I just try to let my imagination run riot. One of the stories in the collection was inspired by a Metro journey when I began daydreaming about a man getting in a carriage and producing two monkeys from his coat.
“As Homer Simpson says ‘It’s funny because it’s a monkey’, so I then began to think about how I could turn the idea into a plot.”
Other quirky stories in the collection include a tale about a bizarre quest to find a dead rock star’s limb in the story Jim Morrison’s Leg and a memorable warning about the hidden dangers of building sites in Shooting Jelly With a Shotgun.
Adam, who works at Fat Frog Design on Portland Terrace, Jesmond, Newcastle is married to Eve, who is preganant with their first child.
Dial M For Monkey is published by Tonto Press, launched in February to promote the region’s budding writers.
To purchase a copy of Dial M For Monkey visit www.tontopress.com.
