Snapshots of The Boy
Snapshots of The Boy by Shaun Levin, £9
A daring, funny and innovative exploration of the stories hidden inside photographs. Sixteen short lyrical pieces draw meaning and memories from a captured moment in time based on images revisited from the author’s childhood in South Africa and adolescence in Israel. A meditation on love, memory and sexual awakening, and a riff on the lasting presence of the boy in the life of the grown man. (16 stories, 16 full-colour photographs)
Order a copy of Snapshots of The Boy here.
“…Thirty-two pages in all. But Levin… does more with those thirty-two pages than some authors can do with tenfold that.” Jerry Wheeler, Out in Print
Read an excerpt from Snapshots of the Boy:
The Boy and His Daddy
…If The Boy was a dog his Daddy would take him for runs on the beach after work in the evenings, to the harbour wall and back, and when his Daddy dashed into the water for a quick dip The Boy would bark at the waves and roll in the sand and work himself up into such a frenzy that when his Daddy came out of the water The Boy would run to him and jump on his chest and make his Daddy laugh and his Daddy would say: good boy.
If The Boy was a dog he wouldn’t be scared of his Daddy because he’d know his Daddy loved him. Even when his Daddy said silly boy, The Boy would hear I love you, and when his Daddy smacked The Boy’s nose, or rubbed it in his own urine, The Boy would know there was no one in the world who loved him as much as his Daddy.
If The Boy was a dog his Daddy would lift him into the bath and spray warm water on him and lather him with special shampoo and dig his fingers into his flesh and knead him and soothe him and when he was done his Daddy would rinse the soap off The Boy’s fur and The Boy would shake his body and spray water all over his Daddy and they’d laugh together and The Boy would bark and they’d wrestle on the floor and his Daddy would hold him tight, both arms around him, and The Boy would struggle and run away because that’s what he does when he has to deal with overwhelming joy….
About Shaun Levin
Shaun Levin’s collection of short stories, A Year of Two Summers, was published in 2005. A novella, Seven Sweet Things, was published in 2003. An extract from his fictional-biography based on the life of artist Mark Gertler was published recently by Sylph Editions. His stories appear in anthologies as diverse as Between Men, Modern South African Stories, Boyfriends from Hell, The Poetry of Men’s Lives, and The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers. He is the founding editor of Chroma: A Queer Literary Journal and teaches creative writing on the Complete Creative Writing Course and at other venues around the UK. Visit him here.
