Ah, Valentine's Day! The day of romance, love, passion, and all those other Hallmark Card-related, sitcom-enforced subjects! Love someone today, or else!
We kid, obviously. It's very pleasant indeed to take one day a year and devote it to love.
But love is a complicated topic, and not all love is love, if you take our meaning.
So please take a perusal of this brief (and incomplete) list of Goose Lane titles that explore all aspects of that mysterious, merciless, messy emotion we call 'love.'
And when we say messy, we mean messy.
After all, Douglas Glover is on the list.
Twice.
16 Categories of Desire by Douglas Glover
- Ranging over time from pre-history to the present, from the American South to the Canadian North, Douglas Glover maps the heart in all its passion, valour, ineptitude, and vulnerability. Occasionally scabrous, horrifically funny, intermittently appalling, and wildly erotic, the stories in this collection bring to life a world in time, irony and desire prevail.
- "A book about love and its passions. It is a book that any adult can learn from and maybe understand themselves and perhaps forgive themselves a bit." — The Library of the Found Inkwell
A Sharp Tooth in the Fur by Darryl Whetter
- The thirteen provocative stories in A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, Darryl Whetter's first collection, offer lots of sex, a bit of violence, and a wickedly clever exploration of human nature.
- "What most arrests about this debut is the deliberate subversion of expectations. He can pin down his insights with wonderful precision, moving from dispassionate perception to an abrupt and moving burst of emotional truth." — The Globe and Mail
Almost a Great Escape by Tyler Trafford
- Following his mother's death in 2004, Tyler Trafford discovers an album of old letters and creased photographs that reveal a mother he never knew, a man he's never heard of, and a love affair doomed by class and circumstance. The letters are from Jens Müller, a Norwegian pilot who trained in Canada during the early days of World War II, one of only three prisoners who would make it home after The Great Escape.
- "This is not a sentimental love story. It belongs in another, higher category. It's one that people of both sexes and any age past puberty will appreciate. And incidentally, it's a fine piece of writing and composing." — The Guardian
The Darren Effect by Libby Creelman
- An affair. A marriage. Accidental encounters. A secret spying mission masquerading as research for a short story on desire. This is the rich ground from which The Darren Effect springs, carrying us through the complexities, tragedies, and unanticipated triumphs of love and loss.
- "Libby Creelman peoples her novel with fascinating varieties of injured souls. A tender, surprising, moving read." — Alan Cumyn
The Douglas Notebooks by Christine Eddie
- Christine Eddie tenderly weaves a fable for our time and for all times...a sonnet on our relationship with nature, and an elegy to love and passion.
- "[A] timeless love story...In a slim volume of sparse, poetic prose, Eddie deftly and movingly covers vast territory." — Publisher's Weekly
Greetings from the Vodka Sea by Chris Gudgeon
- Bitterly funny and filled with lusty, rueful, comical, calculating, and even affectionate sex, Gudgeon's eleven cosmopolitan stories explore the chasm between loving and being loved in return. Life's randomness is offset by dark comedy and by an eerily familiar synchronicity.
- "Greetings from the Vodka Sea contains stories so unique that it's near impossible to draw them under one clean phrase... If you were to take your strangest obsession or most bizarre experience and put it on steroids, you would have a story for this book." — Quill & Quire
Karenin Sings the Blues by Sharon McCartney
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Karenin Sings the Blues is a meditation sparked by the actors in Tolstoy's 19th-century masterpiece, Anna Karenina. Entering this famous saga of derailed love, McCartney explores the repercussions and unintended consequences of Anna and Vronsky's passion. Here, Anna Karenina's cuckolded husband "sings the blues," but Count Vronsky, too, bemoans his disappointed expectations.
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"Vibrant, polished... stylish, elegant lines... exquisitely written... a familiar universe animated by the small yet pivotal choices that make up a destiny, a life." — Event
This Side of Sad by Karen Smythe
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Part mystery, part elegy, This Side of Sad begins with an ending: the violent enigma of a man's death. Was it an accident, or did James commit suicide? In the shattering aftermath, his widow, Maslen, questions her own capacity for love and undertakes a painful self-inquiry, examining the history of her heart and tracing the fault lines of her own fragile identity. What emerges is a mesmerizing tour of a woman's complex past, rendered in the associative logic of memory and desire.
- "A courageous debut novel and one of the most searing explorations of love and grief you will ever read." — Ian Colford, author of Perfect World
The Violin Lover by Susan Glickman
- Unfolding like a melody, The Violin Lover is infused with music and told in three voices. It is a powerful novel about the love one feels for family, friends, culture, faith and music, and the passion that comes with it — regardless of the outcome.
- "Glickman's mastery and maturity are evident in The Violin Lover. Its final moments are as moving and inevitable as the flow of music toward its conclusion. Readers will be richly rewarded by the beauty and power of her artistry." — Globe and Mail
Savage Love by Douglas Glover
- Savage Love shatters then transforms every conventional notion we've ever held about that cultural-emotional institution we call love.
- "Love as you have never seen it before." — Chatelaine