Scandal at the Alphorn Factory
New and Selected Short Fiction, 19842024
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Assembly Press
Publishing:7th Nov '24
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 7th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
- Review campaign with emphasis on major print review sections, including Tablet, Alma, the New York Times and The New York Review of Books
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- Co-op available
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- Author is on Instagram (@garybarwin), Facebook (@moribund.facekvetch) and Twitter/X (@garybarwin)
- Author website: garybarwin.com
A new collection of stories by Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Gary Barwin that puts the fab in fabulist.
Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 1984–2024 couples brand new and uncollected stories with selections of the most playful and ambitious of Barwin’s previous collections, including Cruelty to Fabulous Animals, Big Red Baby, Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth, and I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251–1457.
Barwin’s prose kicks against short fiction’s more traditional forms: these are pieces that flirt with poetry and playwriting. Whole stories—and worlds—are packed into single compact paragraphs. There are narrators and fleas and lists and imperatives and Hitler’s moustache and radiant happiness.
Known as a “whiz-bang storyteller” who can deliver magical, dream-like sequences and truisms about the human condition in the same paragraph, Barwin’s trademark brilliance, wit, and originality are on display in this can’t-miss collection of short fiction.
"Scandal at the Alphorn Factory is a 40-year love affair with language where the absurd morphs into the soundest logic and the playful duels the profound. Daring in form, Barwin’s work harmonizes his signature wit with imagery that is striking, gorgeous and strange. Engaging imaginatively with the natural world, the body, the family, the future—every story is a surprise. A kaleidoscopic collection that affirms Barwin’s place among our Canadian literary treasures."—Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis
"Is Gary Barwin the Meryl Streep of Canadian Literature? Or the Stephen Curry? By which I mean: what range! These stories sound the depths of character, plot, style, and form with irreverent humour, musical language and boundless curiosity. So maybe he's our Jacques Cousteau—if the guy had stayed home, traded his submarine for a laptop computer, and made up stories about all the things he didn’t know."—Pasha Malla, author of All You Can Kill
“For over four decades now, in between children’s birthday parties, dog walks, and phatic conversations with neighbours, Gary Barwin has been sending emergency communiqués—in the form of allegories, parables, tall tales, and street jokes—from the family hearth in Hamilton, Ontario. He is a maestro of the suburban surreal, reinscribing the liberated and liberating aesthetics of the marvellous with an ethics of care. Our punny chimerical ventriloquial dummy, Barwin speaks out from the head of Kafka, heart of Éluard, and soul of Edson.”—Alessandro Porco, editor of For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe
ISBN: 9781738009886
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages