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Authors: Barbara Gowdy

We So Seldom Look on Love (28 page)

BOOK: We So Seldom Look on Love
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—Saturday Night

“Undoubtedly one of our best writers, Barbara Gowdy looks on love in a way we seldom do: her gaze is unflinching and courageous. And the vision she delivers to us is riveting and unforgettable.”

—The Kingston Whig-Standard

“Stories alive and on the edge.
We So Seldom Look on Love
tests our capacity for understanding what it means to be alive and capable of feeling in the late 20th century.”

—The Vancouver Sun

“Barbara Gowdy’s stunning collection of short stories
We So Seldom Look on Love
plants her firmly in the constellation of Canada’s bright literary lights. Gowdy’s insatiable curiosity, her candor and cool wit emerge like chrysalids from the assembled deformity of this lively and memorable book.”

—The Gazette (Montreal)

“Extremely talented … a very powerful voice, rare in Canadian fiction.”

—Philip Marchand

“We So Seldom Look on Love
is witty and incredibly well written. Intellectually gutsy, artistically adventuresome, it takes your breath away. I would read anything she published.”

—CBC Radio

“Gowdy seems not so much to be in the special-effects business, but to be genuinely exploring the conundrums of human existence. Rarely has a story collection combined such outrageous images with such sureness of technique and gentle humour. It’s Canadian and it’s brilliant.”

—Quill & Quire

“There are so many good things to say about this writer from Canada, with her unencumbered prose, her density of ideas, her joyous weirdness … her gaze is thoroughly different, not of pastiche, or of pointlessness, but sympathetic and rehabilitative.”

—New Statesman & Society

“It’s hard to convey the feeling of sheer excitement that builds up as the book progresses. Each story is a journey into a new way of seeing.”

—The Independent

“These eight stories are surgically painful and precise, yet they lead to an enlarged, embracing sense of life. This is fiction that vivifies.”

—The Independent on Sunday

“Gowdy skillfully walks a fine line between sensationalism and sentimentality to give life and love to the feared and forgotten. An impressive accomplishment.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Also by Barbara Gowdy

THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY
FALLING ANGELS
MISTER SANDMAN
THE WHITE BONE
THE ROMANTIC
HELPLESS

Copyright

We So Seldom Look on Love
© 1992 by Barbara Gowdy. All rights reserved.

P.S. section © 2007 Barbara Gowdy, except for “Points of Faith: An Interview with Barbara Gowdy,” by Steven Heighten, reprinted in P.S. with permission from author.

Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

EPub Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8

www.harpercollins.ca

First published in hardcover by Somerville House Publishing 1992. First HarperCollins paperback edition 2001. This paperback edition 2007.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events and dialogue are imagined and not intended to represent real people, living or dead.

Certain of these stories, in somewhat different form, have been previously published: “Body and Soul” in
Descant,
Number 75, Volume 22, Number 4; “Sylvie” in
Story,
Spring 1992; “Ninety-three Million Miles Away,” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine,
Twentieth Anniversary Issue, Number 74/5, winner of
Canadian Fiction Magazine’s
Annual Contributor’s Prize, and also in
Slow Hand: Women Writing Erotica,
edited by Michele Slung, HarperCollins, New York, 1992; “The Two-Headed Man” in
Quarry,
Volume 39, Number 4; “We So Seldom Look on Love,” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine,
Number 73.

“Ode on Necrophilia” from
The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara,
copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

The author is grateful for the support of the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gowdy, Barbara
We so seldom look on love / Barbara
Gowdy.

Short stories.
ISBN-13: 978-0-00-647523-I
ISBN-10: 0-00-647523-x

I
. Title.

PS8563.O883W42 2007 C813’.54
C2007-900070-3

RRD
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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BOOK: We So Seldom Look on Love
10.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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