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Every Cripple a Superhero
Every Cripple a Superhero
May 19, 2024 5:45 PM

Author:Christoph Keller

Every Cripple a Superhero

'Fascinating ... compelling ... very funny' Sunday Times

'A defiant call to arms ... affecting ... lingers long in the memory after its final page' Morning Star

'A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny' Joanne Limburg

'Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers' Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Most stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether.

Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

Reviews

Fascinating ... [The book is] a series of snapshots, anecdotes, poems and short stories about what it is to be disabled in a world that isn't very interested in accommodating disability. This isn't an angry book, it's a very funny one ... compelling and unsettling. The tension between Keller's intellect and his physical weakness courses through the writing ...Yet his gripe is not with his own physical limitations ... Keller is asking us to consider whether it is disability that is the problem, or whether it is a society that insists on seeing people with disabilities that way

—— Rosie Kinchen , The Sunday Times

A defiant call to arms ... angry and funny in equal measure ... [Keller's life story is] enough to move any reader to remove dust from their proverbial eye ... moving ... Every Cripple a Superhero lingers long in the memory after its final page

—— Craig Campbell , Morning Star

A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny

—— Joanne Limburg, author of Letters to My Weird Sisters

What is it like to have a 'wasting' disease? In Every Cripple a Superhero, the excellence of Christoph Keller's writing is matched by its fearlessness. Precision, tragicomedy, quiet rage, elegant storytelling; every awkwardness, every frustration, every terror, every abjection is illuminated by the superpower of his style. No word or phrase is wasted in this marvellous book. And by the way, it is also a love story

—— Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate 2018-2021 and author of The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019

An eye-opener regarding the everyday obstacles the author has to overcome when negotiating his local environment. The passage describing the absurd, insulting, and tragi-comic experience of visiting an award-winning new building and finding the only way to enter by wheelchair is via a remote corner of the building should be compulsory reading for anyone aiming to design inclusive spaces

—— Laura Vaughan, Professor of Urban Form and Society, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London

Shocking ... Keller's humor is quiet and sophisticated, melancholic and sarcastic, wide awake and always open to the unexpectedly beautiful ... [his] book has a lightness that brings tears to your eyes

—— Kulturzeitschrift

Everyone who doesn't use a wheelchair, and everyone who does, should read Christoph Keller's Every Cripple A Superhero. So many worlds exist side-by-side, yet we seldom truly enter the experience of another. Grace, strength, and humor are superpowers of extraordinary depth and stature, and Keller's slender, powerful book glows like a supernova

—— Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell and Lark and Termite

Explosive and moving, the book also has a real capacity to open the eyes of readers and to change attitudes

—— Procap Magazine

Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers

—— Neue Zürcher Zeitung

The inimitable author of The Handmaid's Tail is spectacular at short stories

—— i

Atwood...writes infectiously... page after page proving that...[her] lavish literary talents remain wholly undiminished

—— Reader's Digest

[Old Babes in the Wood] showcase[s] Atwood's spiky wit and imagination

—— Sunday Express

The 15 stories in this collection from the stellar Margaret Atwood are book-ended by the touching, tender, grief-tinged tales of Tig and Nell

—— Eithne Farry , Daily Mail

There are authors we turn to because they can uncannily predict our future; there are authors we need for their skillful diagnosis of our present; and there are authors we love because they can explain our past. And then there are the outliers: those who gift us with timelines other than the one we're stuck in, realities far from home. If anyone has proved, over the course of a long and wildly diverse career, that she can be all four, it's Margaret Atwood . . . Long may she reign

—— New York Times Book Review

As affecting as any of Atwood's strongest work

—— Wired

In Old Babes in the Wood, Margaret Atwood delivers her signature sci-fi with a human heart. It is a story collection that teems with playfulness and invention... reminding us of her skill in the short form

—— Emily Watkins , i

A highly personal collection

—— Lisa O'Kelly , Observer

The Tig and Nell stories... are subtle and poignant, written in grief and from the heart

—— The Oldie

Devastating and thought-provoking in equal measure, you will find yourself thoroughly entertained - and we're sure you'll return to these again and again

—— Glamour

Atwood brings her trademark wit and invention to bear on subjects as diverse as a pandemic, cancel culture, female friendship, witchcraft - and cats

—— Observer

Old Babes in the Wood... [is] a clear demonstration of her prevailing skill as a writer

—— Arts Desk

As her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood debuts at the top of the fiction chart, Margaret Atwood can rest assured that she has reached literary legend status. It was one thing for The Handmaid's Tale to make it to No 1, but quite another for stories narrated by snails and aliens to do it

—— The Sunday Times

Her latest collection of short stories... proves once again she's also an impassioned observer of everyday people and their struggles, with a hilarious sense of humour

—— RTE *Book Of The Week*

Each [story] is interesting in its own right...Atwood's imagination and mastery of storytelling is evident

—— UK Press Syndication

[A] writer who is still so sparky and brilliant in the sudden ways she tips you into despair or delight. Whatever she's up to, I'll take more if it's going

—— Alys Key , Spectator

Quietly devastating

—— Suzi Feay , The Tablet

Any new publication by the estimable Atwood...is an event and this collection of 15 short stories is no exception

—— Evening Standard

Bracing, darkly funny and cheerfully unsentimental

—— Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2023*

[A] masterclass in writing about the edges of everyday life. This collection of short stories that all link to the Sunshine State captures loneliness, alienation, abandonment and inner resourcefulness in the most creative of tales.

—— Victoria Sadler

Fantastical tales ... You'll be swept up in a wild hurricane of a ride with this lyrical stories of fury and love, loss and hope.

—— Newsweek

Each story is perfectly formed, exquisite, often troubling but there is something so brilliantly humane about her work.

—— Kate Hamer, Wales Art Review
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