Some books just can’t get enough press. And that’s great, because these two deserve it, entirely deserve it: both fresh, both gripping, both highly recommended: what more do you need? Kenneth’s (a book written over the course of 15 years) is a “transomposite narrative,” a genre he coined himself (*See Below for more), and Lisa’s expanded the bounds of what could be done with language and short fiction. If you haven’t read either of these books, which have now officially been as praised as much as any book can hope to be praised, now is the time. Click here to go buy Blackstrap Hawco, Click here to go buy Open.  

  More Selected Accolades for Harvey’s  Blackstrap Hawco

- Declared the #1 best Book Out of Canada in 2008 by Amazon.com!

- A Globe and Mail 2008 Book of the Year

- On the Quill & Quire’s 15 Books that Mattered in 2008 list

- Currently on The International Impac Dublin Literary Award Longlist (shortlist announced in April 2010) 

- Shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (Canada and Caribbean Region)

- A 2008 Giller Prize nominee

- “An Instant Classic.” – Ottawa XPress

More Selected Accolades for Moore’s  Open

- Won The Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award for Short Stories.

- Shortlisted for the 2002 Giller Prize.

- Shortlisted for the 2003 Winterset Award.

- Ranked #18 in Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books.

- “She has mastered the short story.” – Quill & Quire starred review

- Dazzling … Daring … [Moore] has a genius for nailing the physical world on the page.” – Globe and Mail

- “Open is like this from start to finish: perceptive and wonderful.” The National Post

(Also available as an audio book through Rattling Books, click here)

* Harvey introduced the transcomposite narrative in novel Skin Hound: There Are No Words (2000, The Mercury Press). It transcomposes passages of non-fiction with fiction. It combines true-to-life passages that describe actual people with passages featuring fictional characters. It lifts newspaper reports of news events and transplants them, word-for-word, into descriptions of fictional events. It takes the exact wording of journal entries or letters written by real people and attributes them to the hands of supposedly fictional characters. It takes poetry, for example, and uses lines from poems written by the masters and places new lines within the poems that are written by fictional characters…. The transcomposite narrative tries to mirror what we actually see in our memories, because what we see in our minds is always a mixture of fact and fiction or history and myth. It is never entirely one or the other.