Please join us for a special book launch celebrating short stories!

Diane Schoemperlen will be reading from her new retrospective First Things First: Selected Stories.

She’ll be joined by Terry Griggs with her new collection The Discovery of Honey

and Barbara Sibbald with her new collection, The Museum of Possibilities.

WHEN:

June 28th @ 6pm

WHERE:

The store!

366 Bay St (South of Richmond)

A reSet original, First Things First gathers 18 of the best of Diane Schoemperlen’s earliest and uncollected stories, with several being published in book form for the first time. Playfully inventive, comic, moving and profound, this collection will reinforce Schoemperlen’s importance as one of the leading short story writers of her generation.

Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Diane Schoemperlen has published several collections of short fiction and three novels, In the Language of Love (1994), Our Lady of the Lost and Found (2001), and At A Loss For Words (2008). Her 1990 collection, The Man of My Dreams, was shortlisted for both the Governor-General’s Award and the Trillium. Her collection, Forms of Devotion: Stories and Pictures won the 1998 Governor-General’s Award for English Fiction. In 2008, she received the Marian Engel Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. In 2012, she was Writer-in-Residence at Queen’s University. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Hero, the hyper-precocious and nosily omniscient narrator of Terry Griggs’s riotous new book, The Discovery of Honey, is not one to hide her light under a bushel, nor to conceal significant, usually scandalous, happenings in her rural hometown, including her own conception, birth, and various other unruly incidents that occur throughout her young life.

Running wild even before she can walk, Hero goes on a dangerous road trip with an aunt, later takes up with her feral, bad-boy cousin, investigates a crime, kills a best friendship with a few aggressively-applied home truths, falls in conflicted love with the cousin, then determinedly, if unconvincingly, falls out.

A backwater bildungsroman—”dung” definitely included, as Hero is forthright dishing the dirt—The Discovery of Honey confirms Griggs as one of the most uproarious and confoundingly original writers at work today. It’s funny business all around.

Terry Griggs is the author of the Cat’s Eye Corner Trilogy, which, consisting of the books Cat’s Eye Corner, The Silver Door and Invisible Ink, has been nominated for multiple children’s writing awards. She is also the author of three novels for adults, including Thought You Were Dead, listed as a Globe 100 pick, and the Roger’s Trust nominated Rogue’s Wedding. Her short fiction collection Quickening was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, and she has been awarded the Marian Engel Award in recognition for a distinguished body of work. She lives in Stratford, Ontario, with her family.

Barbara Sibbald’s The Museum of Possibilities presents sixteen shadow-box narratives—short, concentrated scenes depicting complicated relationships, strong emotions and hard consequences.

The quirky short stories in this collection focus on pivotal moments of intense longing—for love, for power, for fame, for freedom, for revenge, and perhaps most of all, for connection in an increasingly disaffected world.

Barbara Sibbald is an author, editor and journalist. Her previously published works include The Book of Love and Regarding Wanda. A health journalist for over twenty years, she currently works as News and Humanities editor at the Canadian Medical Association Journal. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.