Canada Day


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am writing to ask for recommendations. In particular, I am looking for unusual self-published or small press Canadian fiction.

That's the short story. The long story, if you're curious, is this: I have proposed that the music blog Weirdcanada.com (an award winning site with a discovery-first ethos which places a premium on the local, the bizarre, and the innovative) expand into Canadian fiction. I am interested in this project because I like fiction and I like Weirdcanada.com. However, I don't know much about boundary-pushing, genre-defying, experimental Canadian fiction. In fact, I don't know anything about boundary-pushing, genre-defying, experimental Canadian fiction. A friend recently self-published a Choose-your-own-adventure about being a research mathematician, and I wrote about it [1]. Surely
there are other oddities like that out there, but I don't know where or how to find them.

I am writing you with the hope that you will be able and willing to help me find more unusual Canadian fiction.

Thank you,
David Steinberg

[1] http://weirdcanada.com/2012/02/ex-libris-mathematics-odyssey-kent-windermere/

Unknown said...

David,
My basement office has been flooding recently and most of my books are hiding in plastic bins ... but I can give you some suggestions for now. If you're looking for boundary-pushing and genre-defying, you should look at Aritha van Herk's novels and non-fiction; books like Places far from Ellesmere.

Also the work of the late Robert Kroetsch -- his last book of poetry, Too Bad, grabs the reader with a startling and funny cover and keeps getting better from there.

Stuart Ross and Sheila Heti are writers of engagingly unusual and surprising fiction.

And I might add my collection of short fiction, The Logogryph, which is a bibliography of imaginary books.

I invite readers to add their own recommendations.

Come to think of it, this would make a good topic for a blog post...

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much! I'll take a look at those recommendations.

David

P.S. It's no coincidence that I contacted you. The Logogryph was my inspiration for this project

Anonymous said...

As promised:
http://weirdcanada.com/2012/10/ex-libris-the-logogryph-thomas-wharton/

Unknown said...

Thank you David for this amazing disquisition on The Logogryph. It reads like a piece that belongs in The Logogryph itself, since it sounds like you're referring to an imaginary, impossible book.