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list price: $11.95
edition:eBook
also available: Paperback
category: Fiction
published: Oct 2012
ISBN:9781770563315
publisher: Coach House Books

Cosmo

by Spencer Gordon

tagged: humorous, literary, short stories (single author)
Description

If reading most short story collections is like canoeing gently down a tranquil and picturesque river, then reading Spencer Gordon's Cosmo is like riding a jetski over Niagara Falls with Leonard Cohen whispering in your ear. You'll join Matthew McConaughey as he drives naked across the desert in a surreal dark night of the soul. You'll meet a young wrestling fan half-nelsoned by circumstances and a sister's best intentions. You'll hear a Miley Cyrus admirer defend his passion in a 3,000-word sentence. You'll watch an aging porn star don a grotesque dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of his life. Through ten incendiary and mercurial stories, Cosmo will take you on a wild ride over the churning waters of pop culture and the malaise of our solitary existence.

About the Author

Spencer Gordon is the author of a yet-untitled book of poetry-fiction hybrid works from House of Anansi Press, to be released in spring 2024. He is also the author of the poetry collection Cruise Missile Liberals (Nightwood Editions, 2017) and the short story collection Cosmo (Coach House Books, 2012). He co-founded and edited the literary journal The Puritan for a decade and has taught writing at Humber College, OCAD University, George Brown College and the University of Toronto. He now lives in Bowmanville, Ontario, and works as the Senior Research Editor for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). For more info, visit his website at spencer-gordon.com.

Editorial Reviews

"Though offering a gaudy all-you-can-eat spread of pop/junk cultural references, the book selects its menu wisely, hitting both the salad bar and the sundae counter in equal measures, as it were ... the care and craft of these stories, both in their form and in prose [is] playfully enthusiastic and digressive, yet rarely overstuffed, burrowing into the knottiness of humanity while avoiding the hazards of total schmaltz. For example, he would likely do much better with a half-assed buffet metaphor than was attempted above." —HTMLGiant


"Cosmo succeeds not only as a well-wrought and keenly written collection of narratives, but also as a work of analysis ... a rare book in that it is brave enough to explore the ways in which being loved in private has a very real counterpoint in public, in the form of fame, public identity and cultural cache. In doing so, Gordon dissects the very idea of the authentic in an increasingly public world in which the self is ever more constructed." National Post


"Try any first page here, and, if you are not mouth agape with voyeuristic thrill, then this writer is not Spencer Gordon, one of the most daring writers I've ever come across. These stories read like collaborations between Stephen King and TMZ with Borges and Nabokov on the edits. Each short story sounds with the thunder of a novel. Enthralling, dark, gut-busting stuff!" —Jeff Parker, author of Ovenman and Igor in Crisis: A Russian Journal

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