A new collection of stories by Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Gary Barwin that puts the fab in fabulist.

Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024–1984 couples brand new and uncollected stories with selections of the most playful and ambitious of Barwin’s previous collections, including Cruelty to Fabulous Animals, Big Red Baby, Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth, and I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251–1457.

Barwin’s prose kicks against short fiction’s more traditional forms: these are pieces that flirt with poetry and playwriting. Whole stories—and worlds—are packed into single compact paragraphs. There are narrators and fleas and lists and imperatives and Hitler’s moustache and radiant happiness.

The author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction and books for children, Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist from Hamilton, Ontario and the author of the nationally bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates (Penguin Random House Canada) which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award; and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019.)
A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature and has co-won the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Arts Award. He was one of the judges for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize. Barwin has been Writer-in-Residence at Western University, Hillfield Strathallan College and McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library. His writing and recordings have been published/released in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally—from Readers Digest to Granta. He is on the organizing committee for Hamilton’s LitLive Series and regularly presents, performs and exhibits in the city.

Gary Barwin's profile page

"[Barwin] is known as a gifted humourist and teller of magical, fantastical tales that fully immerse readers in dream-like worlds and explorations of the human condition, and those skills are on full display in this tome of magnificent collected works."—Open Book

"Barwin’s surrealism combines Chagallian levitation with Wallace Stevens’s supreme fiction, as he puzzles puzzles. Clockwise, counter-clockwise, and otherwise, Barwin’s page turns itself and turns itself, orchestrating each instrument through comedy and lyrical longing."—The Seabord Review

"The mystery of life is not explained, here, but it is revealed in symphonies of mind expansion. Take the journey through Barwin’s black hole; you’ll be amazed by what you’ll find."—The Miramichi Reader

Scandal at the Alphorn Factory is a 40-year love affair with language where the absurd morphs into the soundest logic and the playful duels the profound. Daring in form, Barwin’s work harmonizes his signature wit with imagery that is striking, gorgeous and strange. Engaging imaginatively with the natural world, the body, the family, the future—every story is a surprise. A kaleidoscopic collection that affirms Barwin’s place among our Canadian literary treasures."—Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis

"Is Gary Barwin the Meryl Streep of Canadian Literature? Or the Stephen Curry? By which I mean: what range! These stories sound the depths of character, plot, style, and form with irreverent humour, musical language and boundless curiosity. So maybe he's our Jacques Cousteau—if the guy had stayed home, traded his submarine for a laptop computer, and made up stories about all the things he didn’t know."—Pasha Malla, author of All You Can Kill

“For over four decades now, in between children’s birthday parties, dog walks, and phatic conversations with neighbours, Gary Barwin has been sending emergency communiqués—in the form of allegories, parables, tall tales, and street jokes—from the family hearth in Hamilton, Ontario. He is a maestro of the suburban surreal, reinscribing the liberated and liberating aesthetics of the marvellous with an ethics of care. Our punny chimerical ventriloquial dummy, Barwin speaks out from the head of Kafka, heart of Éluard, and soul of Edson.”—Alessandro Porco, editor of For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe