Tales from the Mall

Tales from the Mall

Ewan Morrison

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 1908885017

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Fashion, food courts, lingerie, fire bombing, suicide, free parking—welcome to the mall.  Winner of the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize and Glenfiddich Writer of the Year.

Why would one woman threaten to kill another for a pair of discounted shoes? Why are cross-dressers drawn to mall car parks? What do impulse buys have to do with rioting? How are some malls "vampiric" while others are "pregnant?" And why are market research companies hiding the truth from us?  A mash-up of fiction, essays and true stories, this collection tells of the rise of the most iconic symbol of our modern age: the shopping mall. From more than 100 interviews and confessions, Ewan Morrison re-tells the true-life tales of those who work, shop, and even find love inside their walls. With wry wit, insight, and compassion, he reveals how malls manipulate our emotions, how they are an ideal space to meet a new lover or to kill yourself, and how they are taking over the world. As shopping malls spread round the globe at the amazing speed of one new mall every 72 hours, and everyone, in every country ends up wearing the same fashions, Tales from the Mall gives us a page-turning tour of the history of the mall and a vision of our coming future. Packed full of terribly tweetable facts and gut wrenching, sometimes hilarious stories; this book will change the way you think about your hair color, your loyalty cards, the global economy, and your boyfriend or girlfriend—forever.

A Cure for Cancer

Remarkable Creatures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I mean two, one each, maybe … or something. This is so Dave. You want me to be girlfriend? And this sends the girl’s friends into hysterics. She is speaking to them now in Spanish. Dave shrugs. He went to Madrid once with Sally Carter; Sally had a couple of secret addiction issues and that’s maybe why Dave turned out so square, but that’s a story he’d rather I didn’t repeat. Raj is giving him frantic facial indicators, much like Stealth’s. Sorry, Dave blurts out, My friends made me do this.

Tradition and higher values. Thus, the ‘America’ in ‘Mall of America’ does not designate a locality but, in an act of circular reasoning, acts as a guarantor of qualities that are ‘American’. In this sense, every mall, everywhere is a ‘Mall of America’. 5. As most large regional malls are owned by international conglomerates (for example Braehead Shopping centre – on the outskirts of Glasgow – which is owned by a UK-based corporation that also has properties in the USA) the use of signifiers.

Only flat soled shoes. And they couldn’t conceive, because of his tubes, but that was a long story. Anyway, so she decided to do a bit of self-esteem shopping. Was that when you found your perfect Chloe shoes? The interviewer asked. No, no, no Susan said. They were a whole year out of date by then and everyone was wearing pumps or those wedgy stiletto thingies. Me in pumps or stilettos? So I was pretty depressed, not just about that, but other things. Totally slash-my-wrists actually, if you.

Would make a dash for it. BABY CARE There are, it has been said, eighty-two types of person in the world. But people are not types, you might protest; they cannot be numbered – such an idea is contemptible to any free-thinking person; a pseudo-scientific lie cooked up by market research companies to put people into boxes, to hide the radical fact that each and every individual is unique and free to forge their own future. This was certainly what Les’ parents believed in the spring of.

Its willfulness. Hell, maybe Borders would be happy, they could do an insurance job for fire damage. And he doesn’t run, or try to put it out; others could do that, if they really had to. The alarms scream round him, people running in panic, he can hear them on the floors below. Smoke is in his lungs, and the sprinklers wet his face, but the flames fight on, and he thinks them quite beautiful and does not run. Maybe the mall will burn to the ground and they’ll come and arrest him, maybe they’ll.

Download sample

Download