Pictures from Hopper

Neil Campbell’s new collection of short stories draws upon the work of American painter Edward Hopper. Many of the stories are directly inspired by the visual stimuli of a painting, some combine the influence of several different works and some simply use the titles of paintings as starting points.

In his wide-ranging second full-length collection of fiction, Campbell writes stories about love, sex, death, art, adultery, the media, marriage, suburban violence, consumerism, childhood, suicide, loneliness, music, mountains, wildflowers, birds, football, alcoholism, prostitution, obsession, incarceration, sociopaths, and laughter.

Campbell brings to life a mythical America, packed with images of gas stations, hotel rooms, lighthouses, diners, boardwalks, boarding houses, cinemas, offices at night, railroads, freight trains and sunlight by the sea, written from the perspectives of both men and women, in locations as diverse as the American Midwest, New York, Los Angeles, Texas, New Jersey and San Francisco, as well as Brazil, Manchester, Middlesbrough, The Peak District and The Isle of Arran.