Fiction
10: Best Canadian Stories
Edited by John Metcalf
The editors of this series have always looked for and encouraged innovation, elegance and sophistication. John Metcalf is no exception. One thinks at once of the strange prose of Jean Rhys, the challenging shapes of Ann Beattie, the starkness of a Carver, the fine detail of Amy Hempel, the glories of the late Beckett. In Canada one thinks of the work of Caroline Adderson, Marjorie Celona, Terry Griggs, Annabel Lyon, Rebecca Rosenblum, Mark Jarman, Douglas Glover and K.D. Miller. Mavis Gallant once said that the one question to ask is, Is the story alive or dead? Read this book and see for yourself.
8.5 by 5.5 by 167 pages, cover by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1352 5
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1353 2
ISSN 0703 9476
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Contributors: Patricia Young, Laura Boudreau, Annabel Lyon, Julie Booker, Zsuzsi Gartner, Stephen Gauer, Cathy Stonehouse, Shaena Lambert, Marjorie Celona, Rebecca Rosenblum
“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 10
Edited by Mark Anthony Jarman
 | Alexander MacLeod has published stories in many Canadian and American journals. His voice is rich, harsh and powerful. Born in Cape Breton, he now teaches at St. Mary’s in Halifax. A book-length collection called Light Lifting is coming soon. Wasela Hiyate has worked as a waitress, a television producer and a teacher. All these things turn up in her fiction. Right now, she’s working on a novel while planning her next big adventure. Théodora Armstrong lives in Vancouver, where she too is at work on a novel. Her stories are about everything from misty ferries to drunk driving. These are three writers to watch.
8.5 by 5.5 by 165 pages
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1354 9
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1355 6
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New writers who first appeared in Coming Attractions include Rohinton Mistry, Frances Itani, Peter Behrens, Lisa Moore, Dennis Bock, Neil Smith, Diane Schoemperlen, Timothy Taylor, Bonnie Burnard, Sharon Butala, Steven Heighton, Mary Swan, Caroline Adderson, Rebecca Rosenblum, 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.
Reliving Charley
Dean Serravalle
Charley is a retired teacher of Shakespeare who has a friend, Samuel. Samuel has discovered a serum that reverses ageing in his hamster. Charley insists on trying it out and finds that it works on him too. It works, but brings as many problems as it solves. It turns out that reliving your life is as difficult and dangerous as living it the first time. This is a book about the Faustian dream, a book about mortality and eternal life, a book, as one character puts it, about cheating God.
8.5 by 5.5 by 160 pages, cover by James Ensor
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1364 8
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1365 5
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Dean Serravalle has worked as a screenwriter, freelance journalist, social activist and teacher. His stories have been nominated for the Journey Prize and National Magazine Awards. He currently lives with his wife and two sons in Niagara Falls, where he teaches English literature and edits writers4peace.com, an online literary journal that publishes creative writing targeted at issues of social justice.
The Goon
Jerrod Edson
 | Jerrod Edson has written a hockey book with a difference. Jack Jones used to be an enforcer in the NHL. He’s retired now, with a few too many beers under his belt and a lot of good memories. The best part of his life is over, but there’s still a drink to be enjoyed, a woman to flirt with and hockey to watch. This is a story about loss and the first uncertain steps toward recovery.
8.5 by 5.5 by 156 pages, cover by Amedeo Modigliani
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1356 3
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1358 7
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Jerrod Edson was born in 1974 in Saint John, NB, and went to university at Carleton and York. The Dirty Milkman was published in 2005 and A Place of Pretty Flowers in 2007. He has worked in both Europe and Asia, and now teaches school in Toronto, where he lives with his wife Leigh and daughter Hadley. He is an avid hockey fan. See jerrodedson.blogspot.com.
“With The Goon, Jerrod Edson moves from being one of the province’s top young writers to being one of the best New Brunswick writers, period. In Jack Jones, a former NHL enforcer, Edson embodies his hometown—tough, rough, haunted, full of equal parts unfulfilled ambition and heart. The Goon can be safely considered the best New Brunswick novel of 2010.”—Saint John Telegraph-Journal.
High Speed Crow
Sheila McClarty
This is a first collection of stories from a young Manitoba writer. The stories are all about voices: the voice of a woman riding the bronze statue of a bull, the voice of a man on his last day at a garbage dump, the voice of a doctor at the end of his career. What links the stories is the sensitive mind of the writer and the pure and beautiful prose in which she works. Sheila McClarty has won first prize at the Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest. She has also appeared in both Grain and Fiddlehead.
8.5 by 5.5 by 136 pages, cover detail by Paul Gauguin
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1359 4
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1361 7
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Sheila McClarty graduated from the University of Toronto with a Master of Social Work degree. Her short stories have appeared in various magazines, including Grain, The Antigonish Review and The Fiddlehead. She lives outside Oakbank, Manitoba with her husband, two teenage children and a herd of horses.
“An engaging trip through a series of unusual lives”—The Telegraph-Journal.
“One of those rare collections that you don’t want to stop reading...stories that take your breath away”—The Winnipeg Review.
Edith Valmaine
Murray Pomerance
 | Edith Valmaine is the story of a man whose wife is habitually unfaithful. A story set in Paris, a city known for its love and its melancholy. A novel about more than Paris or betrayal. A novel about friendship and the small, everyday acts that make life worth living. Most of all, a novel about the tiny, exquisite events that cause the story to unfold as it does. The sound of a police vehicle near the river. Electric rain. The photograph of a man sitting in a neighbourhood café. A night ride on a motorcycle. The old, old story made new and unimaginably pungent by the skill of a great story-teller.
8.5 by 5.5 by 96 pages, cover by Gustave Caillebotte
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1362 4
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1363 1
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Murray Pomerance is the author of three collections of fiction, Savage Time, Magia d'Amore and The Complete Partitas, and three works of criticism, The Horse Who Drank the Sky, Johnny Depp Starts Here and An Eye for Hitchcock. He has been the editor or co-editor of numerous volumes including A Family Affair, City That Never Sleeps, Cinema and Modernity, American Cinema of the 1950s and Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis in American Film. His fiction has appeared in, among other places, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, New Directions and Descant, and he has been anthologized in Prize Stories 1992: The O. Henry Awards and 04: Best Canadian Stories. He lives with his family in Toronto.
Poetry
Pieces in My Hands
William Aide
This new collection reveals once again that pianist and poet William Aide is a Canadian cultural phenomenon. At the heart of his book is the great B minor sonata of Franz Liszt. A series of brilliant sonnets gaily explores the moods, themes and construction of the work and a compact disc bound into the book records Aide’s memorable and dramatic virtuoso performance. Other poems explore the music of Schumann and Chopin (some of it also presented on the disc), as well as the intricate beauty of the natural world, the struggles of human loving, and a family wedding among the lyric landscapes of India.
8.5 by 5.5 by 78 pages, with CD, cover by Eugène Delacroix
$38.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1366 2
$18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1367 9
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William Aide has made numerous CD recordings, including Schumann song cycles with Lois Marshall and the 24 Etudes and Preludes by Chopin. He has appeared on the CBC and BBC and given concerts in the Soviet Union, the USA and Canada. In 1996 he published Starting from Porcupine, a memoir about his music and the life behind it. Sea Voyage with Pigs, a collection of poems about Chopin’s 24 Preludes, followed in 2002, and a second collection, Letters to a Musical Friend, was published in 2007. All three books were packaged with CD recordings of William Aide in concert.
“One of the most inventive and imaginative pianistic talents of our time”—Glenn Gould.
“Aide creates resonant images that deepen our relationship with the music itself…poems that provoke, amuse, teach and move us”—The WholeNote.
Copyright © Oberon Press, 2024 |
