Arvida (eBook)

Description

Finalist for the 2015 Giller PrizeFinalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book AwardOne ofQuill & QuiresBooks of the Year, 2015Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy,Samuel Archibalds portrait of his hometownis filled with innocent children and wildbeasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation,haunted houses and road trips to nowhere, badmen and mysterious women. Gothic, fantastical,and incandescent, filled with stories ofeveryday wonder and terror, longing and love,Arvidaexplores the line which separates memoryfrom story, and heralds the arrival of animportant new voice.PRAISE FORARVIDAStephen King with a Quebecois accent.Paul Marchand,National PostArchibalds writing is clean and his imagery strongPublishers WeeklyThese are American stories. But another America, a hidden America, maybe even more American than the America we think we know These are stories that can only evolve in the imagination, and stories that can do that are a kind of true sustenance.AsymptoteThe four stories that structure [Arvida] expand beyond the working-class town into a fantasy Arvida with mysterious creatures and ghosts and confront Archibalds sources and power as a storyteller.World Literature TodayIts a strange world, even if we do our best to remain blind to its strangeness. Samuel Archibalds stories make this point by way of a tasty mash-up of genres and tropes, from horror cinema to domestic drama to schoolyard mythology. This is fiction that taps a Jungian vein instead of delivering rational understanding, and is all the richer for it.Andrew Pyper,CBC BooksTheres a dark, hard presence in the stories, sometimes wry, sometimes muted, but always lurking like an animal in the undergrowth.Montreal GazetteAn intriguing collection of short stories A melancholic tone haunts each retrospective recasting of the past [in these tales], and the vain project of reminiscence is examined with intelligence and emotional acuity.Pasha Malla,The Globe & MailEerily effective Archibalds interest is in how the past imposes itself on the present, both in the intimate form of family histories and against the larger backdrop of a community that exists slightly out of time Whats fascinating is the sense of people haunted by a place instead of the other way around.Quill & Quire, starred reviewArchibald would already deserve a wheelbarrows worth of kudos for this books nervy, expertly rendered sentences, its polished prose. But what separatesArvidafrom its peers is the fact that Archibald so thoroughly subverts many of our expectations about what this kind of short story collection can do, or should do, or dares to do.Numro CinqThese short stories operate like a dark mirror reflecting the vicious barbarism hidden beneath the staid surface of quotidian small town life.New York Journal of BooksArchibalds descriptions bridge the [real and the unreal], always incredibly physicalvisceral and unsettling.these are stories of stories, what they do, what life becomes through them, and why they should be passed on.Quebec ReadsArchibald tells stories from the end of the world with mythic force.Le Devoir originality in spades One of the best surprises of the new literary season. Arvida, the town built on aluminum by American Arthur Vining Davis is the birthplace of the young writer, who conveys the spirit of this supernatural city built in 135 days, like a blemish that abruptly appears on the tip of ones nose.Chantal Guy,La Presse there are local heroes, a clan of larger than life characters, girls branded by their intimate histories, and a mythical feline that still lurks in the area As soon as you think the writers colours are beginning to appear, he shifts Marie Hlne Poitras,VoirArvidais a must-read. It is a beacon in contemporary Qubec literature, a book that will change something in you Stphanie Pelletier,Le mouton NOIRArchibald pays homage to [Stephen] King, [but Arvida]s more than contemporary imitationThe Chronicle Herald