Douglas Glover

"Savage Love marks the long-awaited return of one of Canada's most lauded and stylistically brilliant authors. Glover skewers every conventional notion we've ever held about that cultural-emotional institution of love we are instructed to hold dear. Peopled with forensic archaeologists, horoscope writers, dental hygienists, and even butchers, Glover's stories are of our time yet timeless; spectacular fables that stand in any era, any civilization. Whether writing about sexually ambiguous librarians or desperadoes most despicable, Glover exposes the humanity lurking behind our masks, the perversities that underlie our actions. Savage Love heralds the return of a master, with laugh-out-loud stories of the best kind, often completely unexpected, rife with moments of tragedy or horror. This is Douglas Glover country, and we are all willing visitors."--publisher's description.

Stories

Savage Love

A 16th-century belle turned Robinson Crusoe, a female Don Quixote with an Inuit Sancho Panza — this is the heroine of the novel that won the 2003 Governor General's Award. Elle is a lusty, subversive riff on the discovery of the New World, the moment of first contact. Based on what might be a true story, the novel chronicles the ordeals and adventures of a young French woman marooned on the desolate Isle of Demons during Jacques Cartier's ill-fated third and last attempt to colonize Canada. In this new readers' guide edition, Douglas Glover's carnal whirlwind of myth and story, of beauty and hilarity brings the past violently and unexpectedly into the present. His well-known scatological realism, exuberant violence, and dark, unsettling humour give his unique version of history a thoroughly modern chill.

A Novel

Elle

Meet Tully Stamper, a failed painter, a bankrupt, a liar, and a tippler of corn juice. He is also a modern-day knight errant and one of the world's last innocents. In this hilarious yet bittersweet tale, Tully staggers out of the Florida swamp and into Gomez Gap, a sliver of the Old South turned Hollywood backdrop. From the moment he stumbles into bed with his sleeping ex-wife and her flamboyant film-director husband, Otto Osterwalder, we become Tully's co-conspirators, sharing his pain, his optimism, and his wayward wit.

The South Will Rise at Noon

Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice Munro, Albert Camus, and the great Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz have in common? In the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera, Douglas Glover’s new essay collection fuses his long experience as an author with his love of philosophy and his passion for form. Call it a new kind of criticism or an operator’s manual for readers and writers, The Erotics of Restraint extends Glover’s long and deeply personal conversation with great books and their authors. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his fiction, he dissects narrative and shows us how and why it works, why we love it, and how that makes us human. Erudite and obsessively detailed, inventive, confessional, and cheeky, these essays offer a brilliant clarity, a respite in an age of doubt. They raise the bar.

Essays on Literary Form

The Erotics of Restraint

Lynn Coady

Shauna Singh Baldwin

Alden Nowlan

Mark Anthony Jarman

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

For Goose Lane's diamond anniversary -- an array of six scintillating stories, gems mined from sixty years of Canada's finest publishing and polished to the brightest hues. This multi-volume collection includes the following: Famed poet Alden Nowlan's A Boy's Life of Napoleon, adapted from his first novel, The Wanton Troopers, posthumously published by Goose Lane in 1988 Douglas Glover's strange and affecting Woman Gored by Bison Lives The Three Marys, a Christmas story with a bite, adapted by Lynn Coady from her debut novel, Strange Heaven Simran, a twisting tour-de-force by Shauna Singh Baldwin Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's stunning What Had Become of Us Knife Party, a wild tale of an Italian vacation gone off the rails, from Mark Anthony Jarman's highly anticipated new collection, forthcoming in 2015

Six@sixty

A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR 2012 “Glover is a master of narrative structure.” —Wall Street Journal In the tradition of E.M. Forster, John Gardner, and James Wood, Douglas Glover has produced a book on writing at once erudite, anecdotal, instructive, and amusing. Attack of the Copula Spiders represents the accumulated wisdom of a remarkable literary career: novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and mentor, Glover has for decades been asking the vital questions. How does the way we read influence the way we write? What do craft books fail to teach aspiring writers about theme, about plot and subplot, about constructing point of view? How can we maintain drama on the level of the sentence—and explain drama in the sentences of others? What is the relationship of form and art? How do you make words live? Whether his subject is Alice Munro, Cervantes, or the creative writing classroom, Glover’s take is frank and fresh, demonstrating again and again that graceful writers must first be strong readers. This collection is a call-to-arms for all lovers of English, and Attack of the Copula Spiders our best defense against the assaults of a post-literate age. Douglas Glover is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction. He is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. Praise for Douglas Glover "So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into ... the author's poetic grace." - The New Yorker "Glover invents his own assembly of critical approaches and theories that is eclectic, personal, scholarly, and smart ... a direction for future literary criticism to take." - The Denver Quarterly "A ribald, raunchy wit with a talent for searing self-investigation." - The Globe and Mail "Knotty, intelligent, often raucously funny." - Maclean's "Passionately intricate." - The Chicago Tribune "Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless." - Kirkus Reviews

Essays on Writing

Attack of the Copula Spiders

Douglas H. Glover

This book is filled with passion and love for the art of writing and is a celebration of reading. Through the prism of the great Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, Douglas Glover provides a scrupulous reading of Cervantes's Don Quixote, opening this 400-year-old Spanish masterpiece to a new generation of readers, showing how Cervantes made his novel, and, finally, revealing how we as readers participate in his magic creation. Glover's brilliant accomplishment resides in his ability to seduce the reader with his own stunning prose and penetrating insight, while also creating the means for anyone to see into Cervantes's genius.

Douglas Glover

Books

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