By Gary Barwin
At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin’s latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world.
Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin’s stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, “what makes them so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.”
Praise for I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457
“There’s so much to love in I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457. Each story is a portal into a wondrous and mysterious parallel world. Like the great U.S. poet, Russell Edson, Gary Barwin’s work inhabits a transcendent country, one in which surprise, delight, discovery, and, above all, gleeful imagination rule the day.”
– M.A.C. Farrant (author of The World Afloat and Darwin Alone in the Universe)
“These stories are as unexpected as they are beautiful. Each one will have you seeing the world in a slightly different way.”
– Andrew Kaufman (author of All My Best Friends are Superheroes and Born Weird)
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and educator and the author of seventeen books of poetry and fiction as well as books for both teens and children. His most recent poetry collection is Moon Baboon Canoe (Mansfield Press, 2014). A novel, Yiddish for Pirates, will appear from Random House Canada in 2016. Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, introduced and edited by Barwin is forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2015. Barwin is winner of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award (Writing), the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year 2011, and co-winner of 2011 Harbourfront Poetry NOW competition.
