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The Snows of Yesteryear
Guernica Editions, Spring 2011
145 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781550713381
ISBN10: 1550713388
English
$15.00 Canada, $15.00 US
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Len Gasparini is a master of the dark, hard-edged, densely layered story. In his latest story collection, The Snows of Yesteryear, he charts the climate of the human heart with compassion, humor, nostalgia, and irony. His characters are shaped as much by fate as by the hungry ghosts of their own pasts. A desperate publisher dreams up a clever hoax to save his weekly newspaper from going under. Life and art are crucially juxtaposed when a painter sees his ideal model in a young black stripper. A cynical pensioner finds a new purpose in life when his lady friend adopts an ageing Siamese cat. Other stories are comic and nightmarish by turns.
Len Gasparini is a Canadian literary treasure. He has consistently written superb poetry and short fiction for more than forty years. All the while, he has maintained a clear style, never obscuring his work in metaphor while always mining chiefly his hometown of Windsor, Ontario for stellar material, along with other places where Gasparini has lived (mainly Toronto, Vancouver, New Orleans). His new short fiction collection - The Snows of Yesteryear - continues Gasparini's examination of the human condition, as articulated through biting fictional representation... The Snows of Yesteryear is a beautiful and varied book.
Matthew Firth, Front&Centre
In this season of "clever" writing, the big schism between head and heart, the top and bottom notes of plainspeak in Gasparini's narratives are as welcome as frangipani riding the Japan Current from the South Pacific. His prose smells like real earth in the hothouse of artifice... His pen goes everywhere. It does not discriminate... He is always honest, and that is what compels us.
Linda Rogers, The Pacific Rim Review of Books
Books by Len Gasparini
