Description
Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award
One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year, 2015
Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald’s portrait of his hometown is filled with innocent children and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips to nowhere, bad men and mysterious women. Gothic, fantastical, and incandescent, filled with stories of everyday wonder and terror, longing and love, Arvida explores the line which separates memory from story, and heralds the arrival of an important new voice.
PRAISE FOR ARVIDA
“Stephen King with a Quebecois accent.”—Paul Marchand, National Post
“Archibald’s writing is clean and his imagery strong”—Publishers Weekly
“These are American stories. But another America, a hidden America, maybe even more American than the America we think we know … These are stories that can only evolve in the imagination, and stories that can do that are a kind of true sustenance.”—Asymptote
“The four stories that structure [Arvida] expand beyond the working-class town into a fantasy Arvida with mysterious creatures and ghosts and confront Archibald’s sources and power as a storyteller.”—World Literature Today
“It’s a strange world, even if we do our best to remain blind to its strangeness. Samuel Archibald’s stories make this point by way of a tasty mash-up of genres and tropes, from horror cinema to domestic drama to schoolyard mythology. This is fiction that taps a Jungian vein instead of delivering rational ‘understanding,’ and is all the richer for it.”—Andrew Pyper, CBC Books
“There’s a dark, hard presence in the stories, sometimes wry, sometimes muted, but always lurking like an animal in the undergrowth.”—Montreal Gazette
“An intriguing collection of short stories … A melancholic tone haunts each retrospective recasting of the past [in these tales], and the vain project of reminiscence is examined with intelligence and emotional acuity.”—Pasha Malla, The Globe & Mail
“Eerily effective … Archibald’s interest is in how the past imposes itself on the present, both in the intimate form of family histories and against the larger backdrop of a community that exists slightly out of time … What’s fascinating is the sense of people haunted by a place instead of the other way around.”—Quill & Quire, starred review
“Archibald would already deserve a wheelbarrow’s worth of kudos for this book’s nervy, expertly rendered sentences, its polished prose. But what separates Arvida from its peers … is the fact that Archibald so thoroughly subverts many of our expectations about what this kind of short story collection can do, or should do, or dares to do.”—Numéro Cinq
“These short stories operate like a dark mirror reflecting the vicious barbarism hidden beneath the staid surface of quotidian small town life.”—New York Journal of Books
“Archibald’s descriptions bridge the [real and the unreal], always incredibly physical—visceral and unsettling….these are stories of stories, what they do, what life becomes through them, and why they should be passed on.”—Quebec Reads
“Archibald tells stories from the end of the world with mythic force.”—Le Devoir
“… originality in spades … One of the best surprises of the new literary season. Arvida, the town built on aluminum by American Arthur Vining Davis … is the birthplace of the young writer, who conveys the spirit of this supernatural city built in 135 days, like a blemish that abruptly appears on the tip of one’s nose.”—Chantal Guy, La Presse
“… there are local heroes, a clan of larger than life characters, girls branded by their intimate histories, and a mythical feline that still lurks in the area … As soon as you think the writer’s colours are beginning to appear, he shifts …”—Marie Hélène Poitras, Voir
“Arvida is a must-read. It is a beacon in contemporary Québec literature, a book that will change something in you …”—Stéphanie Pelletier, Le mouton NOIR
“Archibald pays homage to [Stephen] King, [but Arvida]’s more than contemporary imitation”—The Chronicle Herald
