Bøger i Canadian Literature serien

Consisting of anonymous e-mail messages sent by the author to an acclaimed visual artist over the course of a year, "Permission" is the record of an experiment: an attempt to forge a connection with a stranger through the writing of a book. Part meditation, part narrative, part essay, it is presented to its addressee as a gift that asks for no thanks or acknowledgement--but what can be given in words, and what received? "Permission" not only updates the "epistolary novel" by embracing the permissiveness we associate with digital communication, it opens a new literary frontier.

"Atavisms" is an original and unsettling portrait of Quebec, from the hinterland to the metropolis, from colonial times to the present, and beyond. These thirteen stories, though not linked in the traditional sense, abound in common threads. Like family traits passed down through the generations, the attitudes and actions of a rich cast of characters reverberate, quietly but deeply, over generations. Here is a group portrait of the individual lives that together shape a collective history. "Atavisms" has been shortlisted for the 2014 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature.

A seeing-eye dog leads a blind man into a frozen river, a southern Baptist loses his memory and finds true love in Bel Air, an obese dot.com executive has "anorgasmic" latex sex with her CEO, and a homeless man in New York creates an intellectual universe based on Post-it notes stuck to the inside of his cardboard box shelter--Douglas Glover's stories are wildly inventive, deadpan comedies of our universal human catastrophe. They are sly, demanding and wise--stories about language, desire and love (in a very dark place). The humor veers from the wry and sardonic to the salacious, mordant and playful. And always there are moments of such stark emotional intimacy that the reader slides, almost without noticing, from laughter to lament.