- Paperback: 186 pages
- Publisher: Goose Lane Editions; No edition edition (Oct 1 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0864923147
- ISBN-13: 978-0864923141
- Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 14 x 1.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 259 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,327,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Wanna-be writers, thieving scientists, sex addicts, oxygen-toting old broads, lunatics, good-for-nothings--these are the maimed and maiming souls who animate the erotic tableaux in Douglas Glover's cleverly executed short story collection 16 Categories of Desire. A blackout-prone woman weekending in wintry Quebec City wakes up next to a naked, very dead calèche driver and embarks on a journey of remembering that takes her through vivid icescapes serving as memorials to historical events. Infected with the same "mysterious wasting sickness" that killed their newborn son, a grieving mother wallows while her husband spends himself engaging in a travesty of a tryst that involves a humiliation-craving doctor and a monkey named Mike. Teetering on the edge of extinction, a crustacean undergoes age-old rituals of mating and mourning.
Glover, the author of Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, The Life and Times of Captain N., and A Guide to Animal Behaviour, inhabits this multitude of voices with precision and grace, and infuses his writing with an irony and honesty that shock, though rarely gratuitously. By turns funny, chilling, brutal, satirical, sad, and tender, the 11 stories are a deeply felt, intelligent exploration of desire in its infinite variations, and of our aborted attempts to catch and hold on to a self--and a language--that slip and slide into a "mysterious emptiness." For here, language, like the self,
is a machine of desire. It works along an axis defined by hope and future. When there is no hope, no imaginable future, the mysterious bonds of syntax, the wires that convey the energy of meaning from word to word, disintegrate. Words become the snarls, shrieks and gurgles of despair or they become rituals, motions you go through to pass the time, to keep your spirits up.--Diana Kuprel
Review
“One of the most important Canadian wirters of his generation.” — Philip Marchand, The Toronto Star
“Glover’s style is crisp and precise, his observations chillingly perceptive and satirically biting.” — The Vancouver Sun
“Glover’s style is crisp and precise, his observations chillingly perceptive and satirically biting.” — The Vancouver Sun
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