Helen with a Secret and Other Stories

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.