Description
Fiction. Finalist for the City of Hamilton literary awards.
At times comic, tender, dark, compassionate, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin's latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world. Raging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin's stories are mysterious, luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness, the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, "what makes them so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder."
"Barwin and publisher Anvil Press have taken a risk here, and the result is a book that is unabashedly and delightfully odd... though your brain is sure to be confounded by the weirdness on display, the tone is playful; the weird is meant to allow your logic centre to relax and be receptive to these ideas, and in this way you are left open to experience something profound, moving, and often pretty funny."—The Winnipeg Free Press
"There's so much to love in I, DR. GREENBLATT, ORTHODONTIST, 251-1457. Each story is a portal into a wondrous and mysterious parallel world. Like the great US poet, Russell Edson, Gary Barwin's work inhabits a transcendent country, one in which surprise, delight, discovery, and, above all, gleeful imagination rule the day."—M.A.C. Farrant,author of The World Afloat and Darwin Alone in the Universe
"These stories are as unexpected as they are beautiful. Each one will have you seeing the world in a slightly different way."—Andrew Kaufman, author of All My Best Friends are Superheroes and Born Weird
Author Bio
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist. His 25 books include A Cemetery for Holes, with Tom Prime and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and also a finalist for both the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear next year and AMPERS&THROPOCENE, a collection of his visuals based on the ampersand was published by Penteract Press (UK) in August 2020. He has a PhD in music and has been writer in residence at many universities and libraries. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario where he holds the David W. McFadden Chair in Diffuse but Earnest Luminosity at the National Rhyme Institute of Canada.
Author City: Hamilton, ON CAN