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list price: $18.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
category: Fiction
published: Aug 2007
ISBN:9780887847769
publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
imprint: Astoria

Gargoyles

by Bill Gaston

tagged: short stories (single author), literary
Description

Here is the best of Bill Gaston's stories since the publication of his Giller Prize nominated collection, Mount Appetite (2002). In this extraordinary work, Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle -- the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions.

In Gaston's marvellous, riotous, Rabelaisian world, Gargoyles are physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which we human beings subject ourselves. Indeed, as Gaston wrote each story, he sketched out a distinct gargoyle to look down over it. For that reason, each story in this collection has a strange and unique guardian spirit whose sometimes benevolent, and sometimes malevolent, presence informs the characters and their actions. Gargoyles shows one of our best writers at the top of his form.

About the Author

Bill Gaston is the acclaimed author of seven novels and six short story collections, as well as poetry, drama and a memoir. His previous collection of short fiction, Juliet Was a Surprise (Hamish Hamilton, 2014), was nominated for the Governor General's Award, and his most recent novel, The World (Hamish Hamilton, 2012), won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. In 2002, Gaston was the inaugural recipient of the Writers' Trust of Canada's Timothy Findley Award for his body of work. He lives in Victoria, BC.

Awards
  • Short-listed, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
  • Winner, ReLit Awards - Short Stories
  • Short-listed, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
  • Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Awards: Fiction
Editorial Reviews

...vivid, unpredictable, and fascinating.

— Toronto Star

[A] compelling and highly original collection.

— Quill & Quire

Every word...is precise and perfect. He layers so much in 15 pages that, once you've finished a story, you feel as if you've absorbed a novels worth of thoughts and images.

— Now Magazine

As always, Gaston's social consciousness is leavened by humour - sometimes gut splitting, often wry, never dull. Close reading and re-reading reward: what eludes in dark water emerges bright and new.

— Daily Gleaner

Whether his characters are twelve-year-old boys or eighty-year-old women, he gets into their skin and pulls us along with him. It is this looking-out from the eyes of someone else that is among Gaston's greatest accomplishments as a storyteller....Besides creating believable characters, Gaston is astonishingly fast at establishing the world each story is set in--an important skill considering how different each story's world is.

— subTerrain

Funny, distressing, scary, deeply human.

— Globe and Mail

...Gargoyles is an example of what short stories can and should achieve: a resilient compactness of prose that rely on nebulous but defined parameters for impact.

— Pique News Magazine

Canada has produced few writers as astonishingly original as Bill Gaston...Gargoyles never fails to entertain, enlighten and dazzle.

— Globe and Mail

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