New Releases by Leon Rooke

When free-spirited teenager Zan sets out on her bike to buy kitty litter she has no idea she’s about to send her neighbour and maybe-sort-of crush Tallis into a months-long coma, kicking off a series of events both real and surreal that will change everything and everyone on her Toronto Annex street. Metafictional appearances are made by characters as diverse as J. J. O’Molloy, Chekhov’s Ryabovitch, an infamous lapdog and the indignant Rebecca Whitehall, heroine of fictional Sheila Shott’s steamy romance novels. As these and a multitude of others interact with the inhabitants of 2X8 Major Street, friendships, dalliances and alliances are formed and re-formed with uncommon results. Unexpected guests arrive ... and stay. Two questions overarch: Will Tallis ever wake up? And what will that mean for everyone?

The two novellas and three short stories in this new collection by the critically-acclaimed, North Carolina-born author Leon Rooke are united by place and mood. Set largely in the post-WWII American South, peopled by Watermelon Queens and ten-year-old business men, these joyful, touching, brilliantly crafted pieces speak to a time and sensibility long forgotten.

In Fabulous Fictions and Peculiar Practices, politics and economics sprawl comfortably alongside prurient dissertations on sex, marriage and aging as Leon Rooke and Tony Calzetta masterfully unfold a narrative of society’s indifference to the sorry plight of the artist. In this unique confluence of image and text, a pompous bank president delivers a rousing oration to his number cruncher clerks, and the painter Cézanne faces off against a disquieting muse and the cold rejection of the artistic community. Art critics, reveling in their own pedantry, find perverse enjoyment in professing ridiculous opinions. And God himself makes a cameo appearance—fearsome, irreverent and, it must be said, at times lecherous.... Satirical, playful and provocative, Fabulous Fictions is a madcap tour de force unlike anything you’ve ever seen or heard before.

April is pluck, prink and plumelets. April is an intellectual colossus who travels with a shotgun under her dress. Marriage to April is like the beauty of pure math ... or like juggling bricks in a hurricane. April is a pearl of a girl, mother and daughter, lover and beloved. April has spit. April is A Developing Story. In his newest collection of poetry, Leon Rooke, author of Hot Poppies, A Good Baby and the Governor General’s Award-winning novel Shakespeare’s Dog, presents a collection of poems about the beguiling, inimitable April. Adopting a variety of distinctive perspectives of her life, her loves and her losses, he builds a picture of his irrepressible heroine and the follies and foibles of the lives through which she passes. Rooke’s poems challenge and amuse, stimulating the senses and subverting expectations. His inventive language and imagery, and his cast of delightfully idiosyncratic characters, allow him to hold up a mirror to society and expose the planes and angles of humanity, all the bumps and hollows of it.

From one of Canada’s most compelling and imaginative writers of short fiction comes a new collection of eleven stories and a novella. With stories both magical and unexpected, Leon Rooke astounds with his approach to the art of storytelling. From the novella about the surreal adventures of Prissy Thibidault in the deep south watching alligator wrestling while white racists turn into blacks; to stories that include the strange wanderings of a boy called Dark in search of his mother; the escape of a couple of gay friends from their respective relationships for the bright lights of Paris; the negotiations with J.D. Salinger for a bag of his garbage; the torment that six-year-old twins inflict on their blind grandfather while their absent mother gives a boyfriend one last shot at romance; the unemployed man who helps to exterminate mosquitoes pleads his case before a judge about the capriciousness of his life; the painter who ruminates on magic dogs, reluctant models, and living with his ornery old father; the novice writer who hilariously tries to follow a how-to-manual; the survivor of a shut-in family who manages to burrow out of his suffocating lot; to a most unusual bank robbery that saves a woman’s life; here are fictional inventions that dazzle and engage. Writing within the aesthetic of magic realism, Rooke writes like a jazz musician, improvising and surprising with every sentence. Hailed by Russell Banks as "a North American treasure," Leon Rooke is surely Canada’s literary answer to the jazz great Miles Davis.

According to Russell Banks, North Carolina ex-pat Leon Rooke''s work charts "what the short story form can and cannot do, for he works out there in the terra incognita mapping limits." Hitting the Charts, a nineteen story Best-Of compilation, offers stories as free from constraint as a Monk solo, and as disquieting and resonant as a southern Baptist preacher at a big-tent revival. Dancing is not forbidden.

Always fresh and original, these timeless stories push the boundaries of the traditional short story form. "Painting the Dog" is vintage Rooke: 17 highly original tales brimming with whimsy and wit, pain and poignancy, and the author''s endlessly astonishing and electric imagination and riotous humour.

A year before "Lewinsky" became a household name, Leon Rooke was at work on this novel about an aging right-wing southern senator''s shenanigans with interns; fraudulent Vietnam War heroes; and the real players in the Washington power playpen: the doorman at the Watergate, the local mafia don and his floozies, and the no-neck "spin-doctors" who "clean up" after the celebrities.

In his first short story collection in five years, Leon Rooke brings together an extraordinary array of documents from diverse hot spots around the world. In an attempt to answer the question What is art?, the stories explore Italian "art," Mexican "art," Gypsy "art," Native "art," and political "art."

"Muffins" is a square; it has a vinyl cover of a photograph of Rooke and his wife and another woman (their daughter?). The photograph-cover, if one reads'''' it closely, shows the daughter reading a book; her back is facing her parents who are at a table eating -- or about to eat -- muffins. There is a book case stuffed with books arranged'''' in a messy way. The photograph has in the middle a rectangle in white lines and the words in different typefaces (and colours): "Muffins" and Leon Rooke under "Muffins." The effect is startling because I see photographs of books within the book itself. And I am thus aware that there is a carefully designed book-within-the-book. And I start thinking about the "relation" of the various elements I have mentioned. Is the cover the beginning of the book? Does it, on the contrary, tell a secret story? I see, finally, that I as reader or viewer must interpret the relations, must join -- or create -- the "performance of interpretation." In a sense, then, I am writing a review of the photograph of the author. And I have not yet opened "Muffins"! My consciousness is whirling!''

A selection of previously published short stories by Rooke, including stories from a book never distributed in Canada, "The broad back of the angel."

Backwoods North Carolinian Leon Rooke has written the all-tome tale of good and evil joined in a battle to the death. Toker and Truman are fighting over a woman called Roby and a baby--the most cunning, magical foundling ever deserted, rescued, imperiled, and pursued.

Most Canadians tend to take their politics seriously; seldom do they see politics as entertainment, as superb low comedy. How I Saved The Province invites us to laugh at ourselves. In these stories people exist in a state of impotence and paranoia. They imagine themselves surrounded by spies. Rooke''s black humour gives a new twist to the image of Big Brother. Yet while the characters live in a world that should be overwhelmingly depressing, their spirits are irrepressible and their voices irresistibly funny.

“Some story collections are as comfortable as plush furniture. But Leon Rooke rips the plush out of the armchairs. His fiction gleams like the chrome and glass of hi-tech.” — Quill & Quire