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Instruction Manual for Swallowing

by Adam Marek (Goodreads Author)

4.02 of 5 stars 4.02 · rating details · 86 ratings · 24 reviews

Exploring what happens when ordinary people collide with bizarre, fantastical situations, this collection of 14 short stories presents an engaging new voice in absurdist fiction. The stories are grotesque, hilarious, unnerving, and moving: a man discovers he has testicular cancer on the day that a Godzilla-like monster attacks the city in which he lives; a kitchen-hand is...more

Paperback, 236 pages

Published April 1st 2012 by ECW Press (first published June 1st 2007)

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May 23, 2012 Beatnik Mary rated it 3 of 5 stars

http://www.cozylittlebookjournal.com/...

This book of short stories is quirky and fun. A lot of other reviewers have compared it to Roald Dahl or Kafka, but a lot of the stories make me think of short stories I used to read in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Magazine as a child. There was one story I remember reading in which an Asian man bore an unlikely resemblance to Napoleon and found himself at risk of being killed and stuffed by an avid collector of Napoleon memorabilia....more

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May 29, 2012 Tami rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: goodreads-giveaways, 2012

I haven't received my copy yet, just received notice I had won. 03/15/12
Received my copy last night and hope to start soon. I have 15 in front plus my current read. 3/29/12
Started yesterday, 5/28/12
Finished 5/31/12

This book is a collection of short stories that are bizarre. There really is not other word for it. The people that are in the stories find themselves in strange situations, where all sorts of odd things happen to them. One woman pregnant with 37 babies? A man obsessed with the weight...more

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Nov 09, 2012 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars

These are very modern stories. By that I mean Marek favours slices of life and vignettes to your more traditional beginning, middle and ending approach but I don't see this as a bad thing—I'm very fond of this style of writing—but I can see others feeling short-changed. For example, in the first story a man goes into a pet shop to discover that the pets there are sold by their volume. The shopkeeper is an amiable sort and when the customer asks what his biggest pet is he's taken to see the forty...more These are very modern stories. By that I mean Marek favours slices of life and vignettes to your more traditional beginning, middle and ending approach but I don't see this as a bad thing—I'm very fond of this style of writing—but I can see others feeling short-changed. For example, in the first story a man goes into a pet shop to discover that the pets there are sold by their volume. The shopkeeper is an amiable sort and when the customer asks what his biggest pet is he's taken to see the forty-litre baboon. The two discuss the market for voluminous pets and the man demonstrates how he ascertains a pet's volume (a large tank of water is involved); the shopkeeper is most annoyed when it turns out that the baboon is only thirty-nine litres. After this detour the customer discusses his needs and seems about ready to settle for a Madagascan nightingale lemur when the story ends. In the second story a woman learns that she has thirty-seven foetuses inside her and we watch the lengths she has to go to to keep all thirty-seven. That's it. No moral. No punch line.

These stories are presented deadpan but there's a lot of dark humour here. A man is injured in a forest and is cared for by a giant talking centipede that fights the urge to eat him because he smells like his now dead wife (the centipede's not the man's). No explanation is given. This is just the way the world is. The same goes for the man who'd plagued by a nest of robot wasps. We do learn that the government has created other robotic insects so presumably the real ones have died out and this is their way of preserving the ecological balance of Nature but that's me just guessing.

Most are hard to classify too. In 'Meaty's Boys' we are faced with a unique zombie apocalypse because these zombies can still interact with those who haven't "turned" and "nearly all retained the ability to get out their credit cards." That really has to be the funniest line in the book and the funniest image: zombies queuing up outside a restaurant to buy bits of bodies but the majority of the stories could actually take place in the real world. In 'Jumping Jennifer' a college girl apparently tries to commit suicide by jumping out of a window and all the story consists of is watching her friends deal with the tragedy. In 'Cuckoo' a married man befriends a sixteen-year-old girl convinced that she's his daughter all grown up even though his daughter is still with him and his wife and still a little girl. In 'Boiling the Toad' a man sees his sweet girlfriend's sexual proclivities take an unexpected and unwelcome turn; the central metaphor is particularly powerful in this one because, it seems, a toad will hop out of a pan of boiling water but if you sit him in a pan of cold water and bring it to the boil he'll just sit there.

The blurb on the cover (from The Independent) says: "Early McEwan meets David Cronenberg" and that's not such a bad take. Other reviewers have mention Dahl (which I can see) or Kafka (which is a bit of a stretch for me). The fact is I could pick any one of these stories and find someone to compare it to but that really doesn't do the man justice. It's the fact that they were all written by the same man that I find interesting. He has a new book coming out next year and I would definitely be interested in reading more by him.
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Apr 24, 2012 Stuart Douglas rated it 5 of 5 stars

Instruction Manual for Swallowing is Adam Marek's first collection according to his website, but I can only assume that he had written pretty widely before creating this compilation of his work. There's little flab on show here, and absolutely no sign that Comma simply collected up every short story he'd ever written, threw a front cover on it and released the new book into the world.

Instead, what we have is a series of highlights, a set of stories where each successive tale trumps the one befor...more Instruction Manual for Swallowing is Adam Marek's first collection according to his website, but I can only assume that he had written pretty widely before creating this compilation of his work. There's little flab on show here, and absolutely no sign that Comma simply collected up every short story he'd ever written, threw a front cover on it and released the new book into the world.

Instead, what we have is a series of highlights, a set of stories where each successive tale trumps the one before it in some respect and where the very best stuck in my mind and popped back up as I lay in bed in the dark.

Like Paul Magrs' Salt Publishing collection, 'Twelve Stories', this is a book about a universe gone slightly and unexpectedly askew. Futuristic tales about metal wasps with red LEDS in their heads and Godzilla rising from the waves and destroying an un-named western city jostle for space with grotesque tales about a woman giving birth to thirty-seven foetuses and suicidal cheerleaders.

These are surreal stories in the proper sense of the word: placing the bizarre into the mundane world, juxtaposing the impossible with the probable, scattering hints of the banal in a universe gone mad. Zombies roam middle England, a man dresses in tea towels and gardening gloves to fight deadly robotic insects and nine foot tall Gilbert and George step out of stained glass into the Tate Modern, wielding giant willies.

It's actually this contrast and the presence of a prosaic background which prevents the book becoming a little too one note for comfort. There's a fine line between 'askew' and 'wacky', but luckily Marek stays on the right side of that line and if the occaisonal story dips a little, it tends to be when - as with the slight tale, 'Sushi Plate Epiphany' - he forgoes this surreal strand and attempts straight-forward story-telling in a straight-forward setting.

At times, I was reminded of John Irving ('Thanks to the monster, he'd stopped dying for a second' ponders the titular hero of 'Testicular Cancer vs the Behemoth'), at others of a more restrained Philip K Dick ('Robot Wasps' and 'A Gilbert and George Talibanimation' in particular) or even David Cronenberg (the slice of gross out horror, best exemplified by 'Belly Full of Rain'), and at others still, of nobody in particular, which was best of all.

Marek is apparently working on a second collection and a novel - can't wait.(less)

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Jul 05, 2010 Craig Wallwork rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found this book because I’ve been interested in submitting something to the publishers, Comma Press, for some time. And I also thought it was one of the coolest titles of a book I’ve seen for a while. The Instructional Manual For Swallowing by Adam Marek is not your average book. It doesn’t quite fit anywhere, which is why you need to read it.

As I’m always searching for strange and wonderful short stories that match, and surpass, the likes of Etgar keret, I was really excited at the prospect...more I found this book because I’ve been interested in submitting something to the publishers, Comma Press, for some time. And I also thought it was one of the coolest titles of a book I’ve seen for a while. The Instructional Manual For Swallowing by Adam Marek is not your average book. It doesn’t quite fit anywhere, which is why you need to read it.

As I’m always searching for strange and wonderful short stories that match, and surpass, the likes of Etgar keret, I was really excited at the prospect of Robotic insects, a restaurant for zombies, and a woman pregnant with 37 babies. In truth, I was damn near peeing my pants. And Marek didn’t disappoint, well, not too much. The first story really blew me away. 40 Litre Monkey tells the tale of a pet shop owner who measures all his animals by their volume. It was funny, sad and very surreal. My expectations were raised, and although the second story in the collection, the one about the pregnant woman with 37 babies, didn’t quite hit me squarely on the chin as the first, I could tell Marek had a gift for pulling you from the page.

The subsequent stories that followed had a little more weight to them, which is probably why they dragged me to real world very quickly. It’s not that these stories are bad, it’s just that based on the first two stories, I was convinced Marek would be my guide to the dark places in his mind. Instead, he decided it would be best all round to “coast” for a while before throwing back the curtain. Ramping it up with stories about a man fighting both testicular cancer and a monster tearing up the city, a boy who can extract cutlery from his body, and the title story which illustrates how the body might function if it was controlled from within by a person, makes Marek an author to keep your eye on.

Sure, with any short story collection, there are going to be lulls. Fortunately, there are not many here. From one story to the next, you’re caught between laughing, reeling back in surprise, and dropping to your knees with wonder. As the blurb perfectly illustrates, as you turn the first page you enter the “surreal, misshapen universe of Adam Marek’s first collection, where the body is fluid, the spirit mechanised and beasts often tell us more about our humanity than anything we can teach ourselves.”

The price tag is worth it for the stories, 40 Litre Monkey, and The Instructional Manual For Swallowing.
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Sep 11, 2012 Stacie Cregg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

I received this book through Goodreads's First Reads program.

In this book are fourteen (sixteen, if you count the bonus stories in the back) of the most inventive, disturbing, and entertaining short stories I've ever read. Many of the stories are simply bizarre: a man, shopping for a new pet, finds himself in a shop where the owner sorts the animals by volume. A group of men hunt the flesh of humans to feed to the patrons of their zombie restaurant. A little boy finds a splinter in his toe; upon...more

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May 14, 2012 Candace rated it 2 of 5 stars

Though the stories in Instruction Manual for Swallowing range widely in the stories being told, there is a common feeling they share. In each story, the effort to be wildly imaginative seems forced and awkward. Marek's voice as a story teller is indifferent at best. He seems to care more about what he can force his characters to do to serve his desire to be a fantastical writer than develop them to respond with authentic emotions to the crazy surreal situations in which they find themselves. It...more

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May 06, 2012 Neva rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Promising starts that I actually like a lot (+ great titles) and disappointing endings. Flat unattractive characters who don't let you neither love them nor hate them + excessive use of gimmicks and an absolutely unexplainable need to explain them (the worst case: that of "Testicular cancer vs. the Behemot" in which there's entire paragraph explaining the meaning of the trick that the author is doing in that very moment, as if the story was told to 10-years old kids who wouldn't see the obvious....more

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Apr 14, 2012 Cait marked it as to-read-eventually

Shelves: short-stories, inter-library-loan

http://saltyink.com/2012/04/11/new-on...

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Jan 04, 2013 Erica rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories

I can see why the publishers at ECW thought to give me this collection when I told them that I'm a huge fan of Etgar Keret; Adam Marek cites Keret as one of his inspirations in the BackLit interview included in this edition. Marek's stories gravitate much more to the grotesque than Keret's, however they maintain a similar balance of the mundane and the fantastic. Instruction Manual for Swallowing lacks some of the emotional resonance of Keret's works, however it is an enjoyable and disturbing fo...more

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Feb 11, 2012 Betty Dickie added it · review of another edition

These stories were beautifully written and very strange. There was one about a woman pregnant with 37babies and with the help of a wacky doctor brings them to term. One dealt with mechanical wasps created by exterminators, that only exterminators, or a gifted computer geek, can destroy. The strangest was the restaurant that served zombies--you don't want to know where they get their meat. Mind messing but fantastic writing.

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May 07, 2012 Alise Hamilton rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantastic-fabulist-absurd-magic, short-stories

Perfect for fans of Aimee Bender and Judy Budnitz and in the great tradition of Kafka and Calvino, the stories here are surreal, yes, but in a way that tells a deeper human truth. Not to mention, hilarious, gross (in a good way), surprising, unique and good ol' entertaining. Read this book!

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Aug 01, 2012 Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars

Inventive, funny and touching tales combining the bizarre, surreal and the everyday. Kafka-esque short stories that when finished, make you want to dive straight into the next.

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Feb 06, 2008 Jafar rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I picked up this book to try a new genre. I thought it was a collection of science fiction/fantasy short stories. While there’s an element of oddity in all of the stories, not all of them seemed obviously to me to be science fiction/fantasy. I think I’m just a novice in this genre. Marek has a pretty good and wacky imagination. Some of the stories were quite intelligent. Three stars because I’m comparing it with the only other collection of fantasy/science fiction short stories that I’ve read: I...more

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Jul 30, 2011 Steven Ackerley added it · review of another edition

Brilliant. The stories are weird, fantastic and touchingly human.

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Dec 28, 2010 Carys rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fantastic, fantastical short stories.

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Sep 07, 2012 James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Especially liked the one about robot bees and meaty's boys. Just ordered the next set of stories, really hope it is as good.

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May 03, 2013 Blogbaas Van 'tVliegend Eiland rated it 4 of 5 stars

8/10

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Sep 04, 2012 Ra rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

awesome!

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May 07, 2013 Adam Hampton rated it 5 of 5 stars

Strange, surreal and honest. I loved these stories. Marek has artifice in the palm of his hand, and moulds it into a journey through both the conscious and subconscious mind. I'm a slightly different person for reading this collection. And better for it.

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Jan 21, 2013 Ross rated it 4 of 5 stars

Adam Marek has a strange mind. It's great though, because this collection of short stories are bizarre and quite brilliantly warped. From robot wasps, to sculptures in the Tate Modern coming to life, measuring animals by volume, massive centipedes and cats who like ipods - weirdness is ramped up to 11.

Thoroughly recommended if you're a fan of Stephen King's short story collections.

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Mar 05, 2013 V Ravina rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

I haven't enjoyed a book this much in a long, long time. I love this book. The stories are strange and beautiful and funny and disgusting. The writing is superb and it felt like the book was written just for me. Rarely do I find books that hit the spot so precisely.

Your mileage may vary.

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Apr 20, 2012 Ken rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

I thought this was a nice collection of short stories... in some parts I thought the writing could have been a little bit stronger but still found it overall to be an enjoyable read.

Thank you for this first-reads copy also!

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Sep 03, 2012 Cathie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Definitely one of the most disturbing books I have ever read, however, the writing was so incredibly good, I'm tempted to read it again. Perhaps I'll take a valium before rereading.

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May 09, 2013 Estela Anders marked it as to-read

May 04, 2013 Jennifer Bell rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: all-time-favourites

May 02, 2013 Serenity rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: anthologies

May 02, 2013 Holly marked it as to-read

Shelves: short-stories

May 04, 2013 Susmita Das bhattacharya rated it 4 of 5 stars

Apr 18, 2013 Sian rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourite-books

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About Adam Marek

Adam Marek is award-winning short story writer. His first story collection Instruction manual for swallowing was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize. He won the 2011 Arts Foundation Short Story Fellowship. In 2010, he was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

His stories have also appeared in Prospect magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Stinging Fly and Riptide,...more

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