Secret Harmonies #002

I’d gotten used to talking to and seeing people again, but it’s probably time to stop that for a few months here in Toronto. Since I only appear on Twitter as a self-promoter or cackling unlogged-in ghoul, this limits my social interaction to chat and emailing, which is alright with me. I’ll have the use of a departed (not dead, just in Berlin) friend’s car for a few months, which lessens the trapped feeling, and the apartment is nice in autumn, when the fatal summer heat has abated and I don’t have to move the dehumidifier to different parts of my bookshelf twice a week.

I didn’t do much today, but I have been working steadily, on projects ranging from a fun TV thriller with my collaborator Kris Bertin to a horrifyingly unsettling pilot with Kris. Instead of short stories I’ve been concentrating on a novel, but one of my stories from 2019 is in this coming-soon Biblioasis book:

The book is out in late November, and you can pre-order it in the usual places or from your local bookstore. Paige Cooper’s book Zolitude is my favourite collection of Canadian short fiction from the past few years, and she was an excellent choice to edit this year’s collection. Her introduction is as good as my favourite pieces in the rest of the collection, and I only dislike one of the stories, which is a goddamn record in anthologies of Canadian fiction. I highly recommend reading both getting this book and reading Paige’s collection.

The recent death of writer Randall Kenan made me quite sad, as he was way too young and his writing is way to interesting to stop. The books are still here, including his recent collection If I Had Two Wings. I had dinner with him at a Southern Foodways Alliance event two years ago, and he was as pleasant and funny to converse with as he was brilliant in his keynote on food in literature, which you can listen to here.

I spent too much time this past month watching Canadian and UK reality shows about people being crushed by horrific debts in the mid-2000s, but I think I’ve come out the other side of that brief obsession. But I am still pretty into buying and reading novels from the Vintage Contemporaries line when they still had this design:

There’s Moberly with two pairs of oddly matched titles. All very different books. I’m not sure why I’ve been reading so many of these lately—they tend to be a nice length, and writing my most recent novel had me thinking a lot of the 80s and 90s when literary novels took up way more space in the cultural conversation, a state that I assumed would last forever when I was a teenager. Anyway, I’ll analyze it later. The books look cool and are good. I’d particularly recommend Janet Hobhouse, whose posthumous final novel was reissued by NYRB.

Since the last newsletter, this is the movie I’ve seen that’s stuck with me most:

It’s an extremely bleak spaghetti Western shot in a snowy landscape with strong and not very optimistic political messaging snuck in. Also Jean-Louis Trintignant’s gun is this weird Mauser:

I’ll write soon with more suggestions on diversions, books, and hopefully some solid publishing news.

NR