Fiction Anthologies (multiple Authors)
Ground Works
Avant Garde for Thee
- Publisher
- House of Anansi Press Inc
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2003
- Category
- Anthologies (multiple authors), Visionary & Metaphysical, Literary
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780887846915
- Publish Date
- Mar 2003
- List Price
- $22.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Out of print
This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.
Description
A surreal array of beautiful anomalies, Ground Works celebrates the innovators behind the unruly iconoclasm at work in Canada's best fiction. The idea for the anthology was Margaret Atwood's. She introduces Ground Works, and joins forces with avant-garde poet Christian Bok to collect the very best experimental fiction written in English between 1965 and 1985.
Sometime between the 1960s and 1980s Canadian society began unbuttoning itself, and our experimental writers helped loosen the threads. This anthology exhibits the first deep breaths.From Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers to John Riddell's Pope Leo El Elope (a tale that recounts a papal assassination, using only the letters E, L, O, and P) to the most radical ecriture feminine of Audrey Thomas and Gail Scott, Ground Works displays Canadian writing as it's never been seen before.
About the authors
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (2002). Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), his first book of poetry, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (1995). Nature has interviewed Bök about his work on The Xenotext (making him the first poet ever to appear in this famous journal of science). Bök has also exhibited artworks derived from The Xenotext at galleries around the world; moreover, his poem from this project has hitched a ride, as a digital payload, aboard a number of probes exploring the Solar System (including the InSight lander, now at Elysium Planitia on the surface of Mars). Bök is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he teaches at Leeds School of Arts in the UK.
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
