Cosmo

(Paperback)

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Description

Winner of the 2013 CBC Overlookie Bookie Award for Most Underrated Canadian Book

"These stories read like collaborations between Stephen King and TMZ with Borges and Nabokov on the edits. Each short story sounds with the thunder of a novel. Enthralling, dark, gut-busting stuff!"Jeff Parker

Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal desert of the soul, an admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three thousand-word sentence in defense of his passion, an aging porn star dons a dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of a lifetime, and Leonard Cohen shills for Subway: these mercurial and wildly varied stories explode the conventions of short fiction.

Spencer Gordon is the co-editor of the online journal The Puritan and the micro-press Ferno House. Cosmo is his first book.

Reviews

"Cosmo succeeds not only as a well-wrought and keenly written collection of narratives, but also as a work of analysis ... a rare book in that it is brave enough to explore the ways in which being loved in private has a very real counterpoint in public, in the form of fame, public identity and cultural cache. In doing so, Gordon dissects the very idea of the authentic in an increasingly public world in which the self is ever more constructed." -- National Post "Though offering a gaudy all-you-can-eat spread of pop/junk cultural references, the book selects its menu wisely, hitting both the salad bar and the sundae counter in equal measures, as it were ... the care and craft of these stories, both in their form and in prose [is] playfully enthusiastic and digressive, yet rarely overstuffed, burrowing into the knottiness of humanity while avoiding the hazards of total schmaltz. For example, he would likely do much better with a half-assed buffet metaphor than was attempted above." -- HTMLGiant

Author Bio

Spencer Gordon is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Cosmo (Coach House Books, 2012), the poetry collection Cruise Missile Liberals (forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in fall 2017), and three chapbooks. He is a co-founder of the ten-year-old literary magazine The Puritan, and his writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, and other forums. He works at a speakers bureau in Toronto.