Sniggerless Boundulations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: 8/4/2014

Contact: Morgan Bell, 0407062595, [email protected]

Local Swansea woman publishes book of experimental super short literary fiction, not so redundant after all

Redundant Council worker, Belmont High graduate, and author, Morgan Bell, spoke at the YWCA She: True Stories session of the 2014 Newcastle Writers Festival. Her book SNIGGERLESS BOUNDULATIONS, a collection of very short stories, sold out at the Macleans festival bookshop.

Newcastle, NSW – SNIGGERLESS BOUNDULATIONS (68pp RRP$14.50) is available at Maclean's Booksellers, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. The book is an examination of the horrors of life, including vignettes, micro fiction, and flash fiction. The author, Morgan Bell, is a native of Swansea, and classmate of NBN television’s Nat Wallace. Her family ran the local general store opposite the public pool for over a decade. Bell graduated from Belmont High and Swinburne University. She is a member of Hunter Writers Centre, Newcastle Writers Group, and Newcastle Speculative Fiction Group.

Bell first published her work in the Newcastle Writers Group Anthology 2012 with the piece, "It Had To Be Done", one of the fifteen stories in SNIGGERLESS BOUNDULATIONS. Bell’s story “The Switch” is due to be published in the Hunter Speculative Fiction Anthology in May 2014 alongside works by award winning authors Margo Lanagan and Kirstyn McDermott. Bell was shortlisted for the 2014 Hunter Writer's Centre Travel Writing Prize for her anti-travel piece "Don't Pay The Ferryman".

When The City of Newcastle decimated their work force in September 2013, Bell’s traffic engineering position was a casualty of the staff cuts. The job-loss coincided with the downturn in the Hunter coal mining industry and public servant recruiting freezes at the state and federal level. As engineering professionals scrambled for technical jobs in the Hunter region, Bell worked the front desk at Spinnakers Leisure Park in Belmont while unsuccessfully attending interviews for local engineering consultants who were themselves on the verge of bankruptcy. In December 2013 Bell sold her furniture, boarded her cats with her parents, and left her Mayfield home to work as an engineering contractor in Sydney. During this time of transition, Bell, a qualified technical writer, collated all the scraps of paper that she had scrawled on during her weekly writers groups since 2011, and was able to edit and format her own manuscript. In January 2014 this manuscript became the widely distributed SNIGGERLESS BOUNDULATIONS. The collection contains bizarre medical conditions, industrious creatures, conniving cops, killers, dead bodies, a rescue mission, homoeroticism, nonchalant students, a secret garden, and the road to hell. Stories range from 120 words to 1500 words.

• "Rarely is an author able to so clearly capture and convey emotions and small slices of life in so few words, with the economy of a poet." (Erica Lovett)
• "Similar in tone to Franny and Zooey, and other Salinger works. Very classic sensibility, with lots of quotable lines." (Maxine Renn)
• “Like a hybrid of unfiltered reality, humanist morality play and whimsical Bizzaro.” (R. B. Fortune-Wood)

Bell’s writing style has been described as clean, crisp, sharp, meticulous, minimalist, carefully executed, vivid, and arresting, and maintains a 5.0 star rating on Amazon and Goodreads.

Interested readers can find more information at http://sniggerlessboundulations.webs.com/ or by following Bell on twitter @queenboxi.

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