Böcker av Gary Barwin

A new collection of stories by Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Gary Barwin that put the fab in fabulist. Scandal in the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 1984-2023 couples brand new and uncollected stories with selections of the most playful and ambitious of Barwin's previous collections, including Cruelty to Fabulous Animals, Big Red Baby, Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth, and I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457. Known as a "whiz-bang storyteller" who can deliver magical, dream-like sequences and truisms about the human condition in the same paragraph, Barwin's trademark brilliance, wit, and originality are on display in this can't-miss collection of short fiction.

Shortlisted for the City of Hamilton book awardAt times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin's latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world.Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin's stories are 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, "e;what makes them so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder."e;Praise for I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457"e;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 U.S. 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."e; (M.A.C. Farrant, author of The World Afloat and Darwin Alone in the Universe)"e;These stories are as unexpected as they are beautiful. Each one will have you seeing the world in a slightly different way."e; (Andrew Kaufman, author of All My Best Friends are Superheroes and Born Weird)

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work 'so compelling is Barwins balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwins trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.