Released 30th November, 2022 // 94 pages // 978-1-915079-50-3
Zero Hours follows the fragmented intersecting stories of a range of characters on zero-hour contracts in Glasgow. A cleaner runs her daughter a bath in an unused guestroom, a waiter witnesses a violent crime, a virtual receptionist takes bookings for a burned down hotel, a server at a football stadium defies gravity, and a chef realises that his migrant colleagues have been invited to a “staff meeting” without him. The form of these stories, sketches and scenes reflects the fragmented nature of precarious contracts.
PRAISE for Zero Hours:
An astute vivisection of the joys and sorrows of the Gig Economy Generation. A collection that with deadpan charm unearths the humanity that lies beneath the alienation.
— Fernando Sdrigotti, JOLTS
A sharp and welcome album of snapshots into Britain’s discardable-worker culture. McCracken chucks the corporate bullshit in the big bins out the back.
— Ruby Cowling, This Paradise
McCracken turns everyday working life into cryptic fairy-tales, cautionary parables and horror stories, revealing the absurd, disturbing and damaging reality of labour right now.
— Jen Calleja, I’m Afraid that’s All We’ve Got Time For
ABOUT Saskia McCracken:
Saskia McCracken is based in Glasgow, Editor at Osmosis Press, and a member of 12 Collective and the Victoria Writers’ Circle. Her publications include Imperative Utopia (-algia press), The King of Birds (Hickathrift Press), Cyanotypes (Dancing Girl Press), and Common Name (Osmosis Press). She won the Floresta poetry prize, came second in the Streetcake Experimental Fiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Future Places Environmental Essay Prize, and longlisted for The Nature Chronicles Prize and Bath Flash Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in Datableed, Magma, Amberflora, Hungry Ghost, and Zarf, and been anthologized by Dostoyevsky Wannabe and SPAM Press.
