Diddle

5/5 ( ratings)

Diddle is a series of absurd, impossible, but faintly connected stories about immigrants living in the USA that will serve to deconstruct the "American Dream" mythos. Somehow each story typifies the experience of life for outsiders in the US, coupled with the impossibility of absolute acculturation. The book comprises a dozen short stories, each generated out of a line from the old nursery rhyme, laced with double entendres, multiple meanings and overlaps. These tales, written by a poet with a rich touch of language, question the very notion of identity and belonging, instead presenting the amalgamated state that most people are forced to live in.

"Diddle is packed with stories that fully articulate their premise and characters, coil like a spring, and then come to fruition when you least expect it. They have a genuine and original rhythm, one that will make you think differently about what fiction can do."
— Brian Evenson

"With the poise and spark of a master storyteller, Daniel Staniforth presents an alchemical phantasmagoria of loosely connecting figures moving like ghosts on the liminality of their adopted culture. Tempered always with warmth and wit, Diddle achieves a lightness of narrative touch which shimmers over the profundity of human experience for the detached and displaced."
— Rebecca Wilby

"A very old nursery rhyme strings these 11 stories together, looping them back to an English home country - on a very long and elastic tether. Did I say funny? The stories are terrible. Grotesque. Tragic. Weird. Unsettling. Full of rifts and panic. And hilarious. And very very American. Each different tale could be located in no other nation.
But -like the rhyme's fragments that function as titles- the language too yanks a reader back. No American would use language like this - plunging out of the on-going rush of an unfolding tale like Judy's clown punch. Only a poet who lives several lives can get us readers to hear and see this way. Take the trip with him."

— Martha King