From baseball to Picasso, Oscar Wilde to Tennessee Williams, post-modernism to American foreign policy, these essays are an appealing mixture of polemic, politics, memoir, travelogue, and literary theory.

In a series of essays about the US, Greer relates how his mother’s obsession wih baseball is overshadowed by her distaste for the American invasion of Iraq, which ends a family tradition of watching the Toronto Blue Jays play their season opener with the New York Yankees in New York.

In another series of travel essays, he recounts being in India during the height of the Pakistan nuclear crisis, his conversations with monks in Cambodia, and his spiritual revelations in Venice.

Darren Greer grew up in several towns in Nova Scotia, including Greenfield and Liverpool. He studied literature at the University of King¹s College, Halifax, as well as Carleton University, Ottawa. His first novel, Tyler's Cape, was published in March 2001 to critical acclaim and was on the bestseller list of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. Still Life With June was nominated for the Pearson Readers' Choice Award at The Word On The Street, Toronto, in 2003 and is the Winner of the 2004 ReLit Award. His 2014 novel Just Beneath My Skin is the winner of the 2015 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the official selection for One Book Nova Scotia 2015.

Darren Greer's profile page

• Joint winner, Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

“It’s never quite clear where the next paragraph will take you, who you will meet, and what you’ll discover about his world and your own … Greer’s remarkably in touch with himself and truthful about the people in his life and the artworks he feels offer redemption. And he’s smart enough to know when to be ironic and when to play it straight.”

Books in Canada