We So Seldom Look On Love

author
Barbara Gowdy

surgeon general's warning
Yes, people, gird your loins, this book is a collection of short stories. In my experience as both a professional and recreational book-pusher, I have noticed that people are often very resistant to reading short stories. Well, kids, it's time to grow up. You're old enough to be able to "start over" with a plot/cast of characters twelve times in the course of one book, if need be. At the end of the day, if you refuse to read short stories, you are turning your back on the strongest and most successful writing out there. The thing with short stories is that they're concentrated and highly intense; so when they fail, they really bomb. But when they succeed, there's nothing better. They are the best of the best, and the worst of the worst, but that's why you have me--I weed out the crap. So go balls-out, just this one time, for me. By next week you'll be singing a different tune.

P.S. Once upon a time, I too was short story phobic--then I saw the light.

what do you get when you cross a female necrophile, a lonely exhibitionist, a two-headed man, Siamese twins, a young girl with a severely enlarged head, and a transsexual in middle america?
Why, Barbara Gowdy's fabulous collection of short stories, of course. Ladies and gentlemen, this author is afraid of nothing. Neither politics, nor manners, nor the socially acceptable will stymie her—so gear up. Her brilliance is creating characters whose bizarre qualities should ostracize them from the reader but, miraculously, don't. Gowdy's prose is sure-footed, clear, and strong. Her characters are nothing short of fascinating. She has a fantastic ability to make the highly strange highly accessible, and the severely taboo intensely erotic. She drafts scenes which are equal parts absurd and moving—but always successful. Guaranteed, you've never read anything like this. With We So Seldom Look On Love you are being handed a world (albeit a bit of an underworld), do not hesitate, step fully across the threshold.

some of the hype
"Barbara Gowdy invites herself, and us, into taboo territory where love and disgust mingle freely. Nothing seems to hold back the narrative flow, not propriety, not politics, not even that ambiguity we once called good taste . . . Gowdy writes about the macabre, but she writes like an angel." —Carol Shields

"Rarely has a short story collection combined such outrageous images with such sureness of technique and gentle humor...It's brilliant." —Quill & Quire

Here's what Margaret Atwood had to say about Mister Sandman, another of Barbara Gowdy's books:
"Mister Sandman displays the quirkiness, the same mordant sense of humor, the same ear for the vernacular, the same innocent-eyed acceptance of the bizarre that characterizes her two previous books...Gowdy surprises and delights; she also — which is rarer — gives us moments which are at the same time preposterous and strangely moving."

other things this author has written
Fallen Angels
Mister Sandman
Through the Green Valley
The White Bone