Savage Love
264 pages
Newest edition published: September 23, 2014
Fiction / Short Story Collections
Paperback: 9780864928511 $19.95
Hardcover: 9780864929013 $29.95
The Globe and Mail Top 100
Quill & Quire Book of the Year
Amazon.ca Editors' Pick, Top 100
Now magazine, Top 10 Books
Chatelaine, Favourite Books of 2013
"This was, hands down, the best book I read in 2013." — Steven W. Beattie,The National Post
Newest edition published: September 23, 2014
Fiction / Short Story Collections
Paperback: 9780864928511 $19.95
Hardcover: 9780864929013 $29.95
The Globe and Mail Top 100
Quill & Quire Book of the Year
Amazon.ca Editors' Pick, Top 100
Now magazine, Top 10 Books
Chatelaine, Favourite Books of 2013
"This was, hands down, the best book I read in 2013." — Steven W. Beattie,The National Post
The return of Douglas Glover, one of Canada's most lauded and brilliant authors.
"Douglas Glover, the mad genius of Can Lit." — Caroline Adderson, The Globe and Mail
Savage Love shatters then transforms every conventional notion we've ever held about that cultural-emotional institution we call love.
"The most stylish, adventurous fiction this country has ever seen." — Quill & Quire
Absurd, comic, dream-like and deeply affecting, Glover's stories are of our time yet timeless, spectacular fables that stand in any era, any civilization.
"Eclectic and obsessive, abrasive and majestic." — Los Angeles Review of Books
Savage Love exposes the humanity lurking behind our masks, the perversities that underlie our actions. This is Douglas Glover country, and we are all willing visitors.
"Douglas Glover, the mad genius of Can Lit." — Caroline Adderson, The Globe and Mail
Savage Love shatters then transforms every conventional notion we've ever held about that cultural-emotional institution we call love.
"The most stylish, adventurous fiction this country has ever seen." — Quill & Quire
Absurd, comic, dream-like and deeply affecting, Glover's stories are of our time yet timeless, spectacular fables that stand in any era, any civilization.
"Eclectic and obsessive, abrasive and majestic." — Los Angeles Review of Books
Savage Love exposes the humanity lurking behind our masks, the perversities that underlie our actions. This is Douglas Glover country, and we are all willing visitors.
+Show more
Author
Douglas Glover was recipient of the 2006 Writers' Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award for his body of work. His bestselling novel Elle won the Governor-General's Award and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A Guide to Animal Behaviour was a finalist for the 1991 Governor-General's Award, and 16 Categories of Desire was shortlisted for the 2000 Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Award.
Awards
Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013
Longlisted: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
Globe and Mail Top 100 from 2013
Quill & Quire Best Book of 2013
Longlisted: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
Globe and Mail Top 100 from 2013
Quill & Quire Best Book of 2013
Reviews
"An exciting and unpredictable collection by a true virtuoso." — Toronto Star
"Glover's collection is bracing, angry, violent and funny. It is, regardless of genre, one of the best books you will read this year." — National Post
"Stories as radiant and stirring as anything available in contemporary literature." — Los Angeles Review of Books
"Glover writes the best way possible: fiercely, idiosyncratically and lovingly.... Douglas Glover, the mad genius of CanLit." — Globe and Mail
"Glover's œuvre...demands comparison to McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, William Faulkner. He challenges readers to enter winding caves of mystery, not in search of answers, but in search of experience." — Music and Literature
"Love as you have never seen it before." — Chatelaine
"Savage Love is an accomplished, funny, and inventive book that readers should rejoice in... By any measure, Savage Love deserves to be recognized as one of the best Canadian books published this year." — Quill & Quire
"Not for the timid, this gut-wrenching collection of physically and emotionally charged fiction lives up to the outstanding reputation that Glover has attained. His distinctive voice may echo into the next century and beyond." — ForeWord
"Savage Love provides more evidence: nobody alive constructs more perfect stories than Douglas Glover. His art is exquisite, conclusive, stainless — but also wide-awake and breathing. That is to say, he's no mere craftsman. In Savage Love, he manages somehow to be both Geppetto and the magic life-giving kiss." — Darin Strauss
"What unifies this collection is the characteristic excellence of Douglas Glover's prose. Otherwise the books is hugely, even shockingly varied in its narrative strategies, its settings, its tones, and its characters, who range from broadly comic figures to a killer so warped by war that he makes the psychotic Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian look benign. This book is urgent, ardent, obsessive, and remarkable." — Steven Heighton
"I, your admiring reader, report myself ever again restored to find in hand the company of your righteous sentences, shout hooray, shout hooray, even splendid, splendid, splendid (borrowing from the great poet Jack Gilbert), like loins, he wrote, like Rome, he wrote.... " — Gordon Lish
"The stories in Savage Love...were a revelation...relieved by moments of sardonic humour, as well as by the skill with which the stories are told.... If you have not read Douglas Glover before, I recommend you do." — therecord.com
"[S]urprising, shattering, wickedly absurd tales rife with parenthetical, fourth-wall-breaking asides and understated cynicism... Savage Love remains one of the strongest, most refreshing short fiction collections of 2013." — Shortlisted
"Douglas Glover always pushes the envelope. Every story in Savage Love is outrageous, creating farce #&8212; and something beautiful — out of human foibles.... Some paragraphs are so gorgeously vivid, I wanted to read them twice.... This is the kind of audacious work our literary juries should be acknowledging." — Now
"Glover's sentences pulse and breathe, seethe and spit; his stories avoid prefab emotion in favour of bracing, often brutal honesty. For the courageous, there was no better collection of stories pubilshed this year." — Quill & Quire, Books of the Year
"Savage Love by Douglas Glover is a perfect collection of short stories for people knowing the world isn't a fairy tale. The stories are rough and frank but brutally honest about the concept of human relations." — inkwellblogspot.ca
"One of Canada's best writers, Glover returns with a brilliant story collection displaying his considerable range and remarkably varied writerly gifts." — The Globe Books 100: Best Canadian fiction — Globe and Mail
"A Douglas Glover short story is like a 10-day journey by Soviet-era jeep over a nation's back roads — head-spinning and breathtaking. Its outcome is enlightening, sickening or utterly confusing, depending on which country he's taken you to.... The best stories in Savage Love...inspire you to seize love by the heart and genitals, consequences be damned.... The frenetic chaos of Glover's writing gets richer as the stories go on, taking us deeper into the desires that fuel love in all its perversions." — Atlantic Books Today
"[A] compact gallery, flint-eyed and snaggle-toothed, of wolfish behaviour; it's also a casebook study in narrative design...the stories smoulder and luminesce with vitiated heat, modulated light....For all its antic form and interpersonal dysfunction, Savage Love remains somehow low key: a quietly virtuosic, artistically backward-looking story collection. Both eclectic and obsessive, abrasive and majestic, it might also be the best novel written anywhere this year....Savage Love is Glover's fifth collection of short stories, and it confirms his longstanding mastery of the genre." — lareviewofbooks.org
"Glover's collection is bracing, angry, violent and funny. It is, regardless of genre, one of the best books you will read this year." — National Post
"Stories as radiant and stirring as anything available in contemporary literature." — Los Angeles Review of Books
"Glover writes the best way possible: fiercely, idiosyncratically and lovingly.... Douglas Glover, the mad genius of CanLit." — Globe and Mail
"Glover's œuvre...demands comparison to McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, William Faulkner. He challenges readers to enter winding caves of mystery, not in search of answers, but in search of experience." — Music and Literature
"Love as you have never seen it before." — Chatelaine
"Savage Love is an accomplished, funny, and inventive book that readers should rejoice in... By any measure, Savage Love deserves to be recognized as one of the best Canadian books published this year." — Quill & Quire
"Not for the timid, this gut-wrenching collection of physically and emotionally charged fiction lives up to the outstanding reputation that Glover has attained. His distinctive voice may echo into the next century and beyond." — ForeWord
"Savage Love provides more evidence: nobody alive constructs more perfect stories than Douglas Glover. His art is exquisite, conclusive, stainless — but also wide-awake and breathing. That is to say, he's no mere craftsman. In Savage Love, he manages somehow to be both Geppetto and the magic life-giving kiss." — Darin Strauss
"What unifies this collection is the characteristic excellence of Douglas Glover's prose. Otherwise the books is hugely, even shockingly varied in its narrative strategies, its settings, its tones, and its characters, who range from broadly comic figures to a killer so warped by war that he makes the psychotic Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian look benign. This book is urgent, ardent, obsessive, and remarkable." — Steven Heighton
"I, your admiring reader, report myself ever again restored to find in hand the company of your righteous sentences, shout hooray, shout hooray, even splendid, splendid, splendid (borrowing from the great poet Jack Gilbert), like loins, he wrote, like Rome, he wrote.... " — Gordon Lish
"The stories in Savage Love...were a revelation...relieved by moments of sardonic humour, as well as by the skill with which the stories are told.... If you have not read Douglas Glover before, I recommend you do." — therecord.com
"[S]urprising, shattering, wickedly absurd tales rife with parenthetical, fourth-wall-breaking asides and understated cynicism... Savage Love remains one of the strongest, most refreshing short fiction collections of 2013." — Shortlisted
"Douglas Glover always pushes the envelope. Every story in Savage Love is outrageous, creating farce #&8212; and something beautiful — out of human foibles.... Some paragraphs are so gorgeously vivid, I wanted to read them twice.... This is the kind of audacious work our literary juries should be acknowledging." — Now
"Glover's sentences pulse and breathe, seethe and spit; his stories avoid prefab emotion in favour of bracing, often brutal honesty. For the courageous, there was no better collection of stories pubilshed this year." — Quill & Quire, Books of the Year
"Savage Love by Douglas Glover is a perfect collection of short stories for people knowing the world isn't a fairy tale. The stories are rough and frank but brutally honest about the concept of human relations." — inkwellblogspot.ca
"One of Canada's best writers, Glover returns with a brilliant story collection displaying his considerable range and remarkably varied writerly gifts." — The Globe Books 100: Best Canadian fiction — Globe and Mail
"A Douglas Glover short story is like a 10-day journey by Soviet-era jeep over a nation's back roads — head-spinning and breathtaking. Its outcome is enlightening, sickening or utterly confusing, depending on which country he's taken you to.... The best stories in Savage Love...inspire you to seize love by the heart and genitals, consequences be damned.... The frenetic chaos of Glover's writing gets richer as the stories go on, taking us deeper into the desires that fuel love in all its perversions." — Atlantic Books Today
"[A] compact gallery, flint-eyed and snaggle-toothed, of wolfish behaviour; it's also a casebook study in narrative design...the stories smoulder and luminesce with vitiated heat, modulated light....For all its antic form and interpersonal dysfunction, Savage Love remains somehow low key: a quietly virtuosic, artistically backward-looking story collection. Both eclectic and obsessive, abrasive and majestic, it might also be the best novel written anywhere this year....Savage Love is Glover's fifth collection of short stories, and it confirms his longstanding mastery of the genre." — lareviewofbooks.org