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The Bibliophile: The Unyielding Human Voice

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A few notes from John Metcalf, followed by a Biblioasis interview with Elise Levine, author of Big of You

When I happened upon Elise Levine’s stories in 1994 or thereabouts I was editing for Porcupine’s Quill press. What struck me about even her earliest work—and I do mean ‘struck’—was how polished and sophisticated it was; she was aeons ahead of her contemporaries having been reading Beckett at the age of fifteen.

“In his works I find a means with which to capture the psychic and emotional states of betweenness, constraint, defiance, the craft involved in giving shape to the tension between the abjection of self-exile and the unyielding human voice. I grasp how what is not said on the page can speak volumes: how silence itself can render an eloquent and moving subtext, and wrenchingly convey the unspeakable” (Elise Levine, Off the Record, Biblioasis 2023).

She refers more than once—though not directly—to Beckett’s play Not I (1973), a play in which Billie Whitelaw was shrouded entirely in black cloth with only her mouth illuminated—and the spotlit mouth delivered at tumbling speed a flooding monologue. This is the way I hear Elise’s fictions; her stories can be described as instruments performing a voice. She has no patience for plot, for ‘what happens next’; her stories are intricate solos; she wants us not to think but to listen; she demands our surrender to the performance.

John Metcalf

A Biblioasis Interview with Elise Levine

DB: Big of You was my introduction to your work. I loved it so much, I’ve been working my way backwards through your catalogue. I’m curious to know how you see Big of You as being different, or a shift away, from your previous books.

EL: Thank you for the love! Big of You extends what I’ve done in previous books, in which I’ve explored questions about power and voiced-over lives and defiance. I carried these concerns with me in writing Big of You, but I also saw it from the outset as more focused than my first two story collections and at times lighter in tone and more sardonic than my novels and novellas. This book full-on centers ambition, striving, the puncturing of expectations, the capacity for self-deceit, and the delight in potentialities and capabilities. Before I began writing the stories in Big of You, I saw it having a clear overall architecture: I would braid the stories together by linking some of the characters through paired narratives in which the characters appear at different points of their lives or otherwise intersect with the situations and preoccupations of other characters. I knew too, before I began writing any of the stories, that I would lean heavily on fabulist or surreal elements to capture lives lived—or entertaining the possibility of living—beyond imposed expectations, and that these elements would help get at the strange internal weather and sea changes over time that personhood can entail.

Elise Levine. Photo credit: Britt Olsen-Ecker.

Big of You strikes me as primarily character-driven. It’s also very attentive to language, but I imagine largely as a means of representing the peculiarities of character (correct me if I’m wrong). What is it about character that appeals to you? How do you discover and approach a new character? Do you ever find the seeds of character in your own life?

I’ve always been a character-driven writer, and yes, I use language—foregrounding it, even—fully in service of evoking character, because in character lies the Big Question: we have these single lifetimes—as far as I know—and what do we do with them? In view of the dark door of individual extinction we all must pass through. And the possibility, that continues to rapidly feel more pressing, of the extinction of humans as a species, along with every other living thing on this planet. My initial ideas for character strike out of the blue and then I spend time in what I think of as a pre-writing stage: writing partial scenes, especially the opening and endings, and making notes on who the characters might be, what their situation is. Fully developing the character, their story, typically takes me a scandalous amount of time and a crazy number of drafts in which I keep digging deeper, further in, asking what does this character really want, what do they fear? Sometimes characters do initially lift from my own life. I mean, I was once a teenage girl let loose for a summer in Europe, as in the story “Arnhem,” which opens the book. I once lived in an apartment in which the living room was dominated—menaced?—by a baby grand piano, as in “Penetrating Wind Over Open Lake.” But with both of these stories, as was the case with others in which I borrowed details from my own life, when I began writing them in earnest the narratives soon wildly diverged from my personal histories and took on their own beast lives.

Don’t miss Big of You and other great Biblioasis titles on the Globe and Mail’s Fall 2025 books list!

One of my favourite stories in Big of You is the three-part “Cooler.” For those who haven’t read it yet, the first part follows a sad-sack casino worker, the second an isolated spacecraft, and the third part features a grumpy, supernatural creature with a blue tail (these short descriptions really don’t do the story justice). The three sections are wildly different in tone. In a recent interview with The Ex-Puritan, you explain that the story arose from an interest in the concept of “coolness” and how what’s cool might be variously depicted. I love that, and wonder if any of the other stories in Big of You began in distinct ways (even if not necessarily derived from a concept)?

Yes, each of the other stories in the book did begin in distinct ways, but usually with a strong sense of character and situation, and a sense of voice and form. For example, I knew from the outset that for “Return to Forever,” which is about three older women who vacation together in the desert at Joshua Tree, while a fourth friend remains back home in a memory-card ward, I would use the first-person-plural point of view and sweeping, single-paragraph sections to evoke a communal voice. In “Witch Well,” the final story, I knew I wanted, before I even began writing it, to use a heightened fabulist approach and a kind of Stepford Wives vibe—along with a tone of perky defiance—to portray a woman’s grief and confusions over a profound loss against a backdrop of the seductive erasures of affluence.

Read Elise’s new interview with Zilla Jones in All Lit Up.

I mentioned that “Cooler” is one of my favourites in the collection. Do you have a favourite story, or perhaps a character that you still think about with fondness or a sense of kinship?

I do feel a weird tenderness toward the main character in “Once Then Suddenly Later,” Adrien Tournachon, a nineteenth-century historical figure whose older brother, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon—better known by his pseudonym Nadar—is a central figure in the history of early modernity. He was a noted proponent of heavier-than-air flight—which led to the development of airplanes—which he advocated for through a series of catastrophic balloon flights. Along the way he invented aerial photography and air mail and underground photography, and was celebrated for his vivid, individualistic photographic portraits of luminaries such as George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Sarah Bernhardt. But his younger brother, Adrien, my main character, suffers from living in the shadow of his older and successful brother. My character is his own worst enemy: he drinks and squanders his time and lesser talents, at one point steals his famous older brother’s identity, lies about his own whereabouts and stature, and never fails to wallow in bitter self-pity. I don’t feel kinship with him, but I do feel for him: he stands in for the perils of striving to lead an artistic, creative life.

You’ve been a professor for a while now, and you teach in the program at Johns Hopkins University. How do you think teaching writing has influenced your own work?

Teaching fosters the excellent practice of generosity as a reader: it keeps me reading closely, open to a multiplicity of stylistic and formal approaches, and with an admiration and respect for other writers’ willingness to explore the infinite ways of what it means to be human. All of which keeps the creative wheels spinning in terms of my own work. Beyond a doubt, it’s a generative circuit, teaching writing and writing.

Have you read anything lately that you’d like to recommend?

Well, a ton of books! But I’ll try to keep myself decent and mention just a few. The story collections Other Worlds by André Alexis and Hellions by Julia Elliott: both are great examples of using fabulist elements to explore the shifts and surprises of selfhood, and both use language and form in innovative ways. Two Booker-longlisted novels: Audition by Katie Kitamura and Flesh by David Szalay, both of whose previous books I’ve loved. In these latest by Kitamura and Szalay, each very distinct from the other, language and form are nearly electric, and used to pose questions about hairpin twists and turns of identity. Another novel, The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana, I admired for its brilliantly controlled sentences and pacing, its taut and suspenseful narrative and vivid interiority—and its ability to generate tremendous empathy, despite the moral horrors it depicts. I also recommend two poetry collections, also quite different from each other: New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae and Little Mercy by Robin Walter. Both books possess tremendous formal clarity and a just-go-for-it approach to digging deep into what it means to be conscious in this strange world we inhabit, for better or for worse. I habitually read a lot of books in translation and I’ll mention here just one of my favourites (okay, it’s actually a two-fer): On the Calculation of Volume (Books I and II), part of a seven-novel series by Solvej Balle, translated into English from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. These first two in the series offer a lovely, surreal portrait of a woman experiencing suspended time, and uses a circumspect, minimalist tone and style—which achieves a nearly hallucinatory quality through its ultra-grounded and slow-paced approach to revealing the beauty and constancy of the many ordinary details of existence. I can’t wait for the remaining books in the series to come out in translation.

In good publicity news:

  • Four Biblioasis books made the Globe and Mail’s list of “61 books to lose yourself in this fall”:
    • Self Care by Russell Smith: “Smith is still at it in this story of a female journalist whose relationship with a man she’s ostensibly interviewing for an article on incel culture starts crossing into risky sexual and emotional territory.”
    • Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney: “The Irish author’s follow-up to the Booker-nominated How to Build a Boat involves a woman who [returns home] in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s cancer diagnosis.”
    • Big of You by Elise Levine: “Reading the still criminally underappreciated Levine is a visceral experience that seems to demand engagement of all one’s senses.”
    • Sacred Rage: Selected Stories by Steven Heighton: “[Heighton] believed the short story was his greatest contribution to literature. For this collection, [his editor] Metcalf assembled 15 of what he deems the author’s best.”
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Daily Mail and on FictionFan’s Book Review Blog:
    • Daily Mail: “A furtive, cagey novel reminiscent of Macrae’s Booker-shortlisted gem, His Bloody Project . . . In recounting one murder, Macrae subtly introduces the idea of another to produce a consummate slice of alternative true crime.”
    • FictionFan’s Book Review blog: “Burnet’s writing is wonderful, as always, and diving deeply into complex characters is one of his great strengths . . . Highly recommended.”
  • Russell Smith was interviewed about Self Care on The Commentary podcast.
  • Marcello Di Cintio was interviewed about Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers on the Collisions YYC podcast: “From farms to care homes, Marcello illuminates a hard truth: we rely on foreign labour to survive, yet deny these workers a place to truly belong.”
  • Illustrations from Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2025 were featured in the LRC Bookworm.
  • Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in Necessary Fiction: “Chadwick’s prose is rich and poetic, containing surprising images and gorgeous complexities . . . leaving the reader hungry to see what the author will do next.”

The Bibliophile: Goran Simić, 1952–2024

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Goran Simić: 1952–2024

Photo: Goran Simić reading at The Windsor Festival of the Book, November 2003, the day he and publisher Dan Wells first met.

This past weekend I spent the better part of forty hours digging through old boxes dating to the earliest days of Biblioasis. A couple of archivists were coming to town on Monday and Tuesday to assess a potential acquisition and I wanted to make sure that the press archives were in presentable condition. It’s been a long-running joke at the office that I don’t recycle, I archive, which also explains the shape of some of the boxes I sorted through: photographs alongside event posters alongside production files alongside edited manuscripts and other press and literary ephemera. It made me nostalgic—which is, admittedly, not very hard to do—but this state was aggravated by the fact that in less than a week it will be the twentieth anniversary of the publication of our first book, Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor & Other Poems. At one point we intended to mark this anniversary with some celebrations, but publishing continues to be hard, so outside of a few notes and posts in places like this, we’ll be focusing our energies on more essential things, like celebrating our authors and their books.

I got lucky early in my delvings, unearthing a range of photographs, documents, and ephemera from 2004–2006, when Biblioasis began to take shape as a press. And items even older than those. In a very real way, Biblioasis Press was conceived as a result of my work running The Windsor Festival of the Book, which began in 2002. I discovered copies of festival programs, posters, and photographs from the first couple of years, including many writers who would become central to Biblioasis as it developed: Caroline Adderson, Mark Kingwell, John Metcalf, Judith McCormack, and Leon Rooke, among others. And Goran Simić.

Photo: Hardcover and paperback editions of From Sarajevo, With Sorrow (Biblioasis) and Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford) by Goran Simić.

In my second year running the festival, we partnered with PEN Canada, who put together a panel of Paulo da Costa, Rishma Dunlop, Goran Simić, and a couple of other writers. I was determined to read at least one book by everyone who participated in our festival: Goran Simić had two titles available in English, Immigrant Blues, recently published by Brick Books, and Sprinting from the Graveyard, a gathering, by David Harsent, of English “versions” of Goran’s poetry dealing with the Serbo–Croatian war, published by Oxford but at that point already out of print. I found copies of both and read them, but it was the latter that especially quickened my pulse. Not yet knowing enough about publishing, I urged Goran to get it again into print; he drew hard on his pipe and did something with his body that, though not a shrug, made it clear that it was out of his hands. (His inscription in my copy: November, cold day 2003 / For Daniel, who surprised me with this book.) Later that evening, at the festival afterparty, I sat down with Kitty Lewis, the long-time managing editor of Brick Books, and enthused about Sprinting and how someone needed to bring it back. Between alcohol and enthusiasm I came on too strong, an occupational hazard, and at some point, exacerbated, she threw her hands above her head to be rid of me and said that if I thought it should be back in print so badly then why didn’t I do it?

That question lingered for months. The main answer was that it seemed an ultimate hubris. I wasn’t a real publisher, and certainly not the kind Goran Simić needed or should expect. We were planning a short fiction chapbook series and our first trade book, but I’d not yet even published anything. I wanted to do more, but had no way of attracting better manuscripts: the few I’d managed to solicit were terrible. So, one afternoon in the early summer of 2004, faking courage (the title of my publishing memoir), I wrote to Goran and told him that Kitty’s challenge had been weighing on me: would he let Biblioasis publish him? The answer came in the mail with not one but two manuscripts, what would become Biblioasis’s second and third trade books: the poetry collections From Sarajevo, With Sorrow, and the story collection Yesterday’s People.

Photo: Yesterday’s People and Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman by Goran Simić.

It had originally been my intent to simply republish Sprinting from the Graveyard as it was, but I knew nothing of copyright then and did not know that Goran did not control these poems: they belonged to Harsent. This, in my ignorance, seemed an injustice. Further, after other conversations with Goran, I learned that he had grave misgivings about Harsent’s “versions” as a result of liberties taken with his original poems: Harsent’s were scrubbed of the raw immediacy of the war. So after discussions with his ex-wife, Amela Marin, we decided to retranslate the collection, and Amela got to work, finishing a draft later that year for a planned Spring 2005 publication. We worked on it via email through the fall, but decided to do the final editing in person.

Over this period, we published Salvatore Ala’s Straight Razor and the first volumes in the Biblioasis short fiction series, including Leon Rooke’s novella Balduchi’s Who’s Who. Goran owned a building with his new partner at 226 Carlton in Toronto’s Cabbagetown, where he had a restaurant called Octopus’ Garden (and later Fellini’s Shoe), and suggested that we launch the press there. We did so on January 29, 2005, with Sal Ala, Rishma Dunlop, Leon Rooke, and Goran. The evening was so exhilarating that I suffered an adrenaline and dopamine hit from which I’ve not yet recovered. That date might mark the moment that the press was born as more than a sideline hustle of an unpractical used book dealer. It seemed, after the struggles of attracting audiences of any size in Windsor, almost too easy. (Later experiences taught me that night was an aberration.) More than a hundred people showed up at Goran’s small bar; it was so crowded that Thomas King offered to be my bookseller for the night just to have a place to sit. The applause was loudest and longest for Goran Simić. And the next day, while Goran helped us nurse our hangovers with a bottle of cognac from behind the bar, Sal and I worked with Amela at the front table in the Octopus’ Garden to make the final edits on the book that became From Sarajevo, With Sorrow. I remember the grey January light smudging through the Victorian front window of his Carlton restaurant, the dust glinting in the dim air, like us, still a little unsettled from the previous night. By the time Sal and I packed up to head home down the 401—a trip I’ve since made hundreds of times over the last twenty years—Biblioasis’s second book was ready for the press.

LEFT: Poster for ‘Not Just Another Reading Series…’ with Goran Simić and Zach Wells, February 13th 2006, presented by Biblioasis and the Flying Monkey Cafe & Juice Bar. RIGHT: Menu for Fellini’s Shoe.

I would work with Goran on two other books: the short story collection Yesterday’s People, published later that same year and also dealing with his war experiences, and 2010’s Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, Goran’s first (and perhaps only) book written in English. His place at 226 Carton, in various incarnations, became Biblioasis’s Toronto home for launches and other events for several years, his spare bedroom often the place I laid my head. A tour this week through the internet’s scattered memory reminded me that we’d planned a selected poems, taken from his untranslated Serbian books. “I have joined the ranks,” he’d written in the introduction to From Sarajevo, With Sorrow, “of those poets who have lost their own tribal language and country, and then gone on to a place where the weight of previously published books is worth almost nothing.” It had been our hope, at the time, to change that, but the manuscript never materialized. I’ve been alerted too often of late of what we forget.

What I remember: the sharp, appealing funk of pipe and garlic; his laugh—he was always laughing—and the gravelly intonation of his English; his eyes sparking, an early warning of a gentle jibe; joking and flirting with anyone with whom he came into contact. (“X reminds me of a big hamburger.” A considered pause. “And I like hamburgers.”) Drinking cognac at Carlton into the evening as a kind of medicinal remedy as he gave me publishing advice and urged me to be more serious. I envied most of all his apparent ease in all things, especially as a person for whom nothing ever seems particularly easy.

I remember him playing soccer with my at-the-time very young son with an empty water bottle in our front yard in Windsor, the sound of glee and childish laughter as they booted around this increasingly crumpled bit of plastic, and not being sure who was laughing hardest or having more fun. I loved him for this, and even after our relationship soured and failed—two supremely impractical men increasingly alienated over necessarily practical matters—I would occasionally remember that crumpled plastic, that laughter, the sparkle, and love him again.

I thought about all this on Friday and Saturday and Sunday as I sorted through some of these earliest records. Grateful all over again for Goran, how his books and the work we did on them in 2004 and 2005 helped to give the press an initial direction and identity, and again saddened at our alienation. I thought, for the first time in many years, of reaching out to him. So when Amela’s message came via Facebook this Tuesday that he’d died on September 29, perhaps at the moment that I was sorting through the posters and restaurant menus and galleys, my sadness deepened. In place of reaching out to him, I’ve now written this.

Photo: Goran Simić reading at The Windsor Festival of the Book, November 2003.

In the introduction to From Sarajevo, With Sorrow he asks “for whom were these poems written under candlelight, between 1992 and 1995?” His answer is worth reading in full, but I’ll give another small bit of it here:

The lines I wrote were written in the belief that, when compared with the cold newspaper reports which would be forgotten with the start of a new war elsewhere, only poetry can be a true and decent witness to war. I remain uncertain whether this is because the history of horror is a bad teacher or we are bad pupils. I simply wrote what I saw. Perhaps I wrote them to explain to myself the fear in my children’s eyes when they walked along streets covered in blood. Or to comfort myself with the fact that I went to so many funerals, but nobody went to mine. New wars have indeed replaced old wars, and it’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since my own war ended, ten years since I wrote these poems as a poet, a witness, and a survivor.

And it’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since I last spoke with Goran, and that in this time where new wars have replaced old wars he isn’t here, as poet, as witness.

Facebook is a useful tool for a flagellant, but it can give some relief as well: to see Goran akilter with his pipe and his dog and his smile. It’s okay: I can still hear his laugh.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

Goran Simić crosses the Mitjacka River on a water run. Frontispiece, From Sarajevo, With Sorrow. Photo Credit: Gilles Peress.

THE FACE OF SORROW

I have seen the face of sorrow. It is the face of
the Sarajevo wind leafing through newspapers
glued to the street by a puddle of blood as I
pass with a loaf of bread under my arm.

As I run across the bridge, full water canisters
in hand, it is the face of the river carrying the
corpse of a woman on whose wrist I notice
a watch.

I saw that face again in the gesture of a hand
shoving a child’s shoe into a December furnace.

It is the face I find in inscriptions on the back of
family photographs fallen from a garbage truck.

It is the face which resists the pencil, incapable of
inventing the vocabulary of sorrow, the face with
which I wake to watch my neighbor standing
by the window, night after night, staring into
the dark.

—Goran Simić, From Saravejo, With Sorrow

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In good publicity news:

COCKTAIL shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award!

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We’re pleased to share that this morning, The Writers’ Union of Canada announced the shortlist for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, which includes Cocktail by Lisa Alward (Sep 12, 2023)! Check out the full shortlist announcement here.

About Cocktail, the jury praised:

“Lisa Alward’s Cocktail is skilful in its ability to capture the nuance and details of daily life in a way that is striking and deeply felt. With beautiful, precise descriptions and expert pacing, she effortlessly reveals tensions that feel both classic and utterly her own. Exploring the emotional and sexual tensions of couples and families in the Sixties and Seventies, these narratives bring the reader to the core of those unspoken moments, leaving us unsettled. The clarity of sound in Lisa Alward’s sentences—word after word after word—makes it impossible to turn your ear away. This is a quiet voice that booms.”

The 27th annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award recognizes the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author published in 2023 in the English language. The Award consists of cash prizes for the three best first collections, with a first prize of $10,000 and two additional prizes of $1,000 each.

The winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 11th at noon EDT on Facebook Live on The Writers’ Union of Canada’s page.

Grab your copy of Cocktail here!

ABOUT COCKTAIL

Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • Shortlisted for the New Brunswick 2023 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction • One of the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall” • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2023 • A Tyee Best Book of 2023

“A writer to watch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he’s made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life’s watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.

Credit: Maria Cardosa-Grant

ABOUT LISA ALWARD

Lisa Alward’s short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize and twice in Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, has been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, an honourable mention in the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and been featured on numerous other long lists, including for the CBC Story Prize and Prism International’s Jacob Zilber Prize (three times). She was born and grew up in Halifax and completed an English degree at the University of Toronto and an MA at Queen Mary College in London, England. In the eighties and early nineties, she worked in book publishing in Toronto, before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where at fifty she began to write stories. Cocktail (Biblioasis), which received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, is her debut collection.

STOOP CITY Wins ReLit Award!

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Stoop City coverWe’re thrilled to announce that Stoop City by Kristyn Dunnion has won the 2021 ReLit Award in the short fiction category!

Founded in 2000, The ReLit Awards are awarded annually to book-length works in the novel, short-story and poetry categories, and are considered the preeminent literary prize in independent Canadian publishing.

Stoop City was selected from a shortlist which also included Here The Dark by David Bergen (Biblioasis), Seeking Shade by Frances Boyle (Porcupine’s Quill), The Swan Suit by Katherine Fawcett (Douglas & McIntyre), The End Of Me by John Gould (Freehand), Swimmers in Winter by Faye Guenther (Invisible), Permanent Tourist by Genni Gunn (Signature Editions), Czech Techno by Mark Anthony Jarman (Anvil Press), Dominoes At The Crossroads by Kaie Kellough (Esplanade), Paradise Island and Other Galaxies by Micheal Mirolla (Exile Editions), and Goth Girls Of Banff by John O’Neill (NeWest Press).

 

ABOUT STOOP CITY

Welcome to Stoop City, where your neighbours include a condo-destroying cat, a teen queen beset by Catholic guilt, and an emergency clinic staffed entirely by lovelorn skeptics. Couples counseling with Marzana, her girlfriend’s ghost, might not be enough to resolve past indiscretions; our heroine could need a death goddess ritual or two. Plus, Hoofy’s not sure if his missing scam-artist boyfriend was picked up by the cops, or by that pretty blonde, their last mark. When Jan takes a room at Plague House, her first year of university takes an unexpected turn—into anarcho-politics and direct action, gender studies and late-night shenanigans with Saffy, her captivating yet cagey housemate.

From the lovelorn Mary Louise, who struggles with butch bachelorhood, to rural teens finding—and found by—adult sexualities, to Grimm’s “The Golden Goose” rendered as a jazz dance spectacle, Kristyn Dunnion’s freewheeling collection fosters a radical revisioning of community. Dunnion goes wherever there’s a story to tell—and then, out of whispers and shouts, echoes and snippets, gritty realism and speculative fiction, illuminates the delicate strands that hold us all together.

ABOUT THE AUTHORKristyn Dunnion

Kristyn Dunnion grew up in Essex County, the southernmost tip of Canada, and now lives in Toronto. She is the author of six books, including Tarry This Night and The Dirt Chronicles, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her short fiction is widely published, most recently in Best Canadian Stories 2020, Foglifter, Orca: A Literary Journal, and Toronto 2033. Dunnion works supporting homeless adults with serious mental illness, and has been a healthy food advocate for marginalized communities in Davenport-Perth, where she resides.

 

Order your copy from Biblioasis, or from your local bookstore!

 

 

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