Camille Roy

Gail Scott

Robert Glck

What is the best way to tell a story? In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bk, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson. Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter. Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative. Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glck, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

Writers Explore Narrative

Biting the Error

On the 10th anniversary of the October Crisis, a woman negotiates her personal passage from Quebec's politically turbulent 1970s.

Heroine

Nicole Brossard

Louky Bersianik

Louise Cotnoir

Louise Duprø

France Thøoret

Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. Collectively authored by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky. Twenty-five years after its first French language publication, THEORY, A SUNDAY (2013), a collaborative feminist poetics text, marks the first in Belladonna's new Germinal Texts series. Written through Sunday meetings in Montreal, this volume gathers six women's theoretical feminist texts, with a new introduction by Lisa Robertson and afterword by Gail Scott and Rachel Levitsky. Translators of this text include Erica Weitzman, Luise von Flotow, Popahna Brandes, and Nicole Peyrafitte.

Theory, a Sunday

A Canadian woman keeps an extraordinary journal of her time in a Parisian studio.

My Paris

A welfare cheque floats down the river, a cowboy spreads the Word of the Lord and crotches tick like clocks: the world of "Spare Parts" is unpredictable, evocative and vividly distorted. Its initial appearance, in 1981, caused a stir; at a time when linear narrative was the m.o. of feminist writing, Gail Scott had the nerve to fracture and dislocate her stories and her language. "Spare Parts" is as vital as it was twenty years ago. Scott's densely textured tales about the world of growing up female in a small town, where violence lurks just beneath the skin, recreate the uncertainty of life. Their incantatory language and tough imagery are as relevant and crucial now as they were then. This edition adds two new pieces, including 'Bottoms Up', an essay on narrative which first appeared on the 'Narrativity' website Scott co-edits.

Spare Parts

Michael Delisle

These stories go through you like the winds of the city of Cleveland, Ohio, land of tornadoes and of Helen’s secret. Delisle plunges his characters into the troubled waters of memory and sensuality, beset by childhood scars and the long shadows of difficult adolescence. Delisle writes at the very edge of battered sensibility, where literature recombines with life in writing that is like song. Michael Delisle has published several collections of poetry, including Fontainebleu, winner of the Emile Nelligan Prize. He is the author of the novels Dée, Private Drama and The Sailor’s Disquiet; and Helen with a Secret is his first collection of stories. Gail Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s The Sailor’s Disquiet was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for translation. My Paris, translator Gail Scott’s sixth book and third novel, a fictive diary set in 90s Paris, authored by a sad diarist whose travel companions include Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein, was named one of the top 10 novels published in Canada in 1999 by Quill & Quire, Canada’s book trade magazine.

Helen with a Secret and Other Stories

Shortlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal Rosine is surrounded by ghosts. Ghosts of family. Ghosts of past lovers. Ghosts of an old Montreal and its politics. Ghosts of the Montreal quarry workers who, in the 1880s, frequented the Crystal Palace gardens, upon whose ruins her Mile-End triplex sits. Her dead maternal family is there, too, with their restlessness, their stories, their forgotten indigenous ancestry, their little crimes and glories. There’s even the ghost of an ancient Parisian gendarme lurking in the dark stairwell, peering through her keyhole. Rosine herself may be a ghost, her voice splintered – sometimes a prurient fly buzzing over the action, sometimes a politically correct historian, a woman perpetually travelling on a bus or lying in bed – and so too is our understanding of narrative. In offering up a kaleidoscopic view of Rosine and her city, The Obituary fractures our expectations of what a novel should be ‐ allowing the history of assimilation, so violent in the West and so often sidelined by the French–English conflicts of Montreal, to burble up and infect the very language we use. Though a mystery, possibly involving murder, The Obituary is less a whodunnit than an investigation of who speaks when we speak. ‘A beautiful, challenging poetic novel that is absolutely stunning.’ – Vallum ‘Even the understatements are compelling … though [Scott] balks at being called experimental, this ain’t your grandmother’s etcetera.’ – Globe and Mail ‘The Obituary pushes narrative into uncharted territory. The text possesses a brilliant essence of time, place and flight that pulls the reader in, holds them close and urges them to read between the lines, the impressions, the moments.’ – Matrix Magazine

The Obituary

Robert Glück

What is the best way to tell a story? In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bök, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson. Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter. Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative. Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

Gail Scott

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