A quick review of books recently recieved at the Geist office.
Carolyn Black wonders what it would be like to have a furry feral creature as a child (The Odious Child and Other Stories, Nightwood), Bruce Burrows explores the complexities of a one-eyed fish named Igor (The River Killers: A Danny Swanson Mystery, TouchWood), Eden Robinson tries to get a look at a Sasquatch (The Sasquatch at Home, University of Alberta Press) and Heidi Jackson writes the diaspora of giant rats (A Rat’s Tale II: Escape From Rattovia, Tate Publishing).
The Sense of an Ending eventually ends (Julian Barnes, Random House), The Everlasting Season is a finite experience (Daniel J. Brommer, Tate Publishing), The Quiet Gentleman speaks (Georgette Heyer, Sourcebooks Casablanca).
Michael Bronte envisions a supernatural world where dead presidents play a lethal board game that has real-world consequences (Presidential Risk, iUniverse), John Nielsen catapults a seventeen-year-old girl into an adventure through space and time (Time Hole, self-published) and Ken Ungerecht postulates that evolution is a logical absurdity (God Theories, Xlibris).
Life lessons are learned in Never Hug a Mugger on Quadra Island (Sandy Duncan and George Szanto, TouchWood); pitches are broken down in $ell Your Own Damn Movie! (Lloyd Kaufman, Focal Press) and ecstasy is achieved in Surpassing Pleasure (John Slater, Porcupine’s Quill).
George Bowering and Jean Baird compile an anthology of mourning (The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning, Random House), Adam Gopnik asks existential questions about a season (Winter: Five Windows on the Season, Anansi), Michelle Shephard analyzes the decade-long aftermath of 9/11 (Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone, Douglas & McIntyre) and Stan Persky examines the triumphs and tensions of modern fiction and non-fiction (Reading the 21st Century, McGill-Queen’s University Press).
Dany Laferrière unites poetry and prose (The Return, Douglas & McIntyre), Stephanie Bolster offers a vision of nature as constructed or framed (A Page From the Wonders of Life on Earth, Brick Books) and Stephen Gauer meditates on grief, coping and forgiveness (Hold Me Now, Freehand Books).
Cornelia Hoogland retells the Little Red Riding Hood story from the perspectives of the mother, the woodsman and Red (Woods Wolf Girl, Wolsak and Wynn), Brian Ralph reimagines the zombie apocalypse as an art-house piece (Daybreak, Drawn & Quarterly), Lynn Coady rethinks the depths of hockey enforcers (The Antagonist, Anansi), Jarett Kobek repeats a story within itself (ATTA, Semiotext(e)), Esi Edugyan revitalizes Paris in the 1940s (Half-Blood Blues, Thomas Allen) and Jenny Sampirisi reintroduces, mutilates and parades out a frog-and-girl opera that plays out like a YouTube mashup of mid-century cartoons set to a contemporary pop song (Croak, Coach House Books).
