An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life

Oscillating between elation and despair, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is the debut short story collection from Sunday Times Short Story Award finalist Paul Dalla Rosa.

How can these stories be so funny, dazzling, deep and dark? This is a sharp collection that will grip you with strange force; the people here are desperate and what happens here is harsh, but it's always laced with wit and insight and the things we don't want to know about sex and work and love. These are fully realised people who may be strangers to themselves, but they come to us through a caustic voice that's also full of heart. Ronnie Scott, author of The Adversary

Paul Dalla Rosa's An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is an existential prayer of a book that attempts to find meaning in a rapidly changing and absurdly disconnected, occasionally nightmarish, modern world. Often bleakly hilarious, while remaining relatably, fiercely, melancholic, Dalla Rosa's characters quietly yearn for love, for change, for those childlike demands that went unfulfilled: to be seen and heard. Oliver Mol, author of Lion Attack!

Paul Dalla Rosa is a seriously talented young writer very much in the interntional spotlight, having been a finalist in the prestigious Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for an English language short story.

Whether working in food service or in high-end retail, lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director, sharing a dangerous apartment in the city, a rooming house in China or a vacation rental in Mallorca, the protagonists of the ten stories comprising Paul Dalla Rosa's debut collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion, ambition and aimlessness, the curated profile and the unreliable body.

By turns unsparing and tender, Dalla Rosa explores our lives in late-stage Capitalism, where globalisation and its false promises of connectivity and equity leave us all further alienated and disenfranchised. His stories are small masterpieces of regret, futility and tenderness, dripping with acuity, irony and wit.

Like his acclaimed contemporary Ottessa Moshfegh and the legendary Lucia Berlin, Dalla Rosa is a masterful observer and unflinching eviscerator of our ugly, beautiful attempts at finding meaning in an ugly, beautiful world.