Fiction
07: Best Canadian Stories
Edited by John Metcalf
A generation ago, John Metcalf edited Best Canadian Stories for seven years. Now that he’s back, he finds himself working with a much greater supply of good Canadian stories. As he puts it, “there used to be very little cream in the bottle. Today the cream is far thicker.” “I already knew what to expect from Mary Borsky, Clark Blaise and Steve Heighton, from Leon Rooke and Keath Fraser. But what a pleasure it was to see such sophistication in the work of Brian Francis and Marjorie Celona. And what a pleasure it has been to welcome Patricia Young, whose first book of stories has only just appeared.” It has been a very good year.
8.5 by 5.5 by 183 pages, cover by Emily Carr
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1301 3
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1300 6
ISSN 0703 9476
|  |
Contributors: Mary Borsky, Bill Gaston, Steven Heighton, Brian Francis, Patricia Young, Clark Blaise, Marjorie Celona, Leon Rooke, Terry Griggs, Keath Fraser
“The arrival, late in the fall each year, of this Oberon collection is always cause for fanfare”—Quill & Quire
“A literary institution”—Ottawa Citizen
Coming Attractions 07
Edited by Mark Anthony Jarman
 | In the Coming Attractions series, Oberon has discovered an astonishing variety of talent and launched an amazing number of successful careers. This year we have three remarkable writers. Julie Paul (like John Cheever) shows that suburbs can have a soul. She writes tactile, loving satire and sends whipsmart, witty despatches from the war of the sexes. Fabrizio Napoleone writes with vigour and verve about the tension and danger in a big Hamilton steel mill, putting every reader under the helmet with a red dot on it. Anik See writes complex, harrowing stories about the relationships between brother and sister, town and country, alcohol and desire.
8.5 by 5.5 by 161 pages, cover by David Milne
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1303 7
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1302 0
|
New writers who first appeared in Coming Attractions include Rohinton Mistry, Frances Itani, Peter Behrens, Lisa Moore, Dennis Bock, Diane Schoemperlen, Timothy Taylor, Bonnie Burnard, Sharon Butala, Steven Heighton, Mary Swan, Caroline Adderson, Linda Svendsen, Gayla Reid.
“Reading Coming Attractions is like test-driving the year’s new cars”—London Free Press.
“Coming Attractions is a who’s who of our best young writers” —The Fiddlehead.
A Place of Pretty Flowers
Jerrod Edson
According to David Adams Richards, Jerrod Edson is “one of our best young writers.” His first book with Oberon, The Dirty Milkman, enjoyed a significant critical and commercial success. This, his latest novel, tells the story of the death of a young man in a car crash and of the devastating effect of the death on the lives of the survivors. Edson writes about these people with understanding and compassion. Even when everything is lost, he seems to say, hope remains. He himself will point out that “loss and redemption are themes I explore in all my novels. Everyone can be redeemed and everyone needs to be.” This is why despair is no part of his world.
8.5 by 5.5 by 158 pages, cover by Lucia K. Mathews
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1313 6
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1311 2
|  |
Jerrod Edson was born in 1974 in Saint John, NB, and graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa. His first novel, The Making of Harry Cossaboom, was published in 2000, and his second, The Dirty Milkman, in 2005. He has lived and worked in both Europe and Asia, and now lives in Toronto.
“Interesting characters and an intriguing plot. The writing is tight, the chapters short…crime and suspense add to the plot and keep the reader speeding through the story to see what other surprises the author might present”—Prairie Fire.
Correction Road
Glen Dresser
 | A correction road is a line along which the vast grid of prairie roads is reset, and the distortion caused by the curvature of the earth is corrected. It is a place of conflict between man and nature. Hugh, an officer with the Alberta Rat Patrol, spends the autumn of 1979 along the roads on the Saskatchewan border, while the people around him try to deal with the traps that have been created in their lives by relationships, obligations and memories. Joan wants to build a future with Hugh, but is increasingly drawn to an enigmatic curator who visits her liquor store; Walt closes down his museum and allows his drinking to pull him back into his memories. Correction Road is a novel about the borders of our lives, the artificial borders we build and the natural borders we destroy.
8.5 by 5.5 by 206 pages, cover by Su Rogers
$24.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1317 4
$45.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1316 7
|
Glen Dresser was born in 1977 and grew up on a farm near the small prairie town of Carbon, Alberta. He later studied journalism and technical writing at Mount Royal College. With his wife, he runs a gallery and bookstore in Calgary that specializes in illustration and design. He has written everything from greeting cards to books on exhibitions, but Correction Road is his first novel.
Kindly Light
Robert Gibbs
“When I began writing this story, I had no idea where it would go or what I would call it. The story began with a voice, the voice of an old man about my age, but not me. When I first saw him he was a twelve-year-old standing at the door of a large rooming-house in Saint John. I went on from there, letting him tell his own story. Only later did I realize that he was sitting where I was sitting writing my memoirs. At first I wanted to be serious, but I soon found that I had lapsed into my old ways and was having fun. I could say a lot more, but I won’t.”
8.5 by 5.5 by 159 pages, cover by Georges-Pierre Seurat
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1310 5
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1308 2
|  |
Robert Gibbs was educated at Cambridge University and the University of New Brunswick, where he remained for many years a member of the department of English, as well as editor and poetry editor of The Fiddlehead. He has been associated with the Maritime Writer’s Workshop since its foundation, and the Director of the Creative Writing Graduate Program at UNB, where he is now Professor Emeritus.
“Kindly Light works marvellously as a loving portrait of nineteen-forties Saint John”—The Fiddlehead.
Poetry
Adagios: O, Clytaemnestra!
Judith Fitzgerald
 | This is the fourth and final part of the four-part epic that Judith Fitzgerald calls Adagios. One of her characters remarks, “explore what’s real and what isn’t. Then, you’ll know what to do.” “What to do,” writes David Staines, “is to read and reread her poetry, where she captures an entire world and its visions.” Thomas Dilworth agrees: “This is poetry of personal and cultural pain and a rich linguistic play that bristles with intelligence.”
8.5 by 5.5 by 56 pages, cover by Sandro Botticelli
$18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1305 1
$38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1304 4
|
Judith Fitzgerald has been a literary journalist—at the Globe and Mail (where she won the Fiona Mee Award), Ottawa Citizen, Windsor Star, Kingston Whig-Standard and Toronto Star—a music critic, writer-in-residence at the Hamilton Public Library, Laurentian University, Algoma University College and the University of Windsor, and the author of two biographies and twenty collections of poetry. Rapturous Chronicles was nominated for the Governor General’s Award, River was shortlisted for the Trillium Award, and Given Names: New and Selected Poems received a Writers’ Choice Award and was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. She was recently awarded a Chalmers Arts Foundation poetry fellowship.
“Her work is incredible—entirely original, deeply moving and universally attractive”—Leonard Cohen.
Still Magical
Don Gutteridge
Don Gutteridge handles old age with extraordinary grace and superb confidence. This book is about many things, but above all it’s about the things that still matter when everything is gone but love and the magic of love, when nothing is left but the child and the grandchild. These things are real.
8.5 by 5.5 by 70 pages, cover Qing Dynasty Youngzhen mark
$18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1307 5
$38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1306 8
|  |
Don Gutteridge is best known as a poet. He began with books about such Canadian heroes as Louis Riel and Samuel Hearne. Then he wrote a book about the legendary Indian chief known as Tecumseh. Later still, he wrote about his own childhood in Lambton County. His last books have had as their central subject the life of the poet as grandfather. For many years Don Gutteridge has lived in London.
Letters to a Musical Friend
William Aide
 | William Aide is one of Canada’s most celebrated pianists. He is also the author of a memoir, Starting from Porcupine, and a small book of poems about Frédéric Chopin, Sea Voyage with Pigs. The poems in the present work treat music as a metaphor for life—for the passion of the young Maria Callas, for the chronic depression of the poet’s wife, for his growing awareness that his own life is approaching its end. David Helwig is the musical friend to whom the book is addressed. He arranged it for the press and, “more than any other reader I can think of,” William Aide says, “I think he understands it.” The book comes with a CD of Aide playing Chopin, Brahms and Beethoven.
8.5 by 5.5 by 86 pages, with CD, cover by Kate Helwig
$18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1315 0
$38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1314 3
|
William Aide received his musical degrees from the University of Toronto and the Juilliard School of Music. Equally at home as a soloist, accompanist or chamber musician, he has collaborated with Walter Susskind, Charles Dutoit, Andrew Davis, Arthur Fiedler, Lois Marshall, Elizabeth Söderström, Rivka Golani and the St. Lawrence String Quartet.
His CD recordings include chamber music by Talivaldis Kenins, Schumann song cycles, the Brahms Cello Sonatas with Ofra Harnoy, and the 24 Etudes and Preludes by Chopin. His most recent CD is Avowals, vocal collections by John Beckwith. He has also appeared on the CBC and BBC and given concerts throughout the former Soviet Union, the USA and Canada.
Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto, William Aide was the inaugural holder of the R.E. Edwards Chair in Piano Performance in the Faculty of Music.
“One of the most inventive and imaginative pianistic talents of our time”—Glenn Gould.
Copyright © Oberon Press, 2024 |
