Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Savage Love is an accomplished, funny, and inventive book that readers should rejoice in...the timing (so essential to comic writing ), point of view, and diversity of language is near perfect...By any measure,
Savage Love deserves to be recognized as one of the best Canadian books published this year." *
Quill & Quire *
"[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." -- Bruce Stone * lareviewofbooks.org *
"There is much that is provocative about
Savage Love ... Glover writes about love in various forms —
philia, eros, and
agape — but each word in the book's title should be afforded equal weight. ... Glover is one of Canada's greatest stylists, and one of the most impressive aspects of
Savage Love is the variety and range of registers he allows himself. ... These stories engage in a process of aggressive defamiliarization, wrecking havoc with readerly sensibilities and exploring — deliberately and insistently — the extreme possibilities of language. 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 *
"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." -- Bill Macnaughton * 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 *
"
Savage Love takes twenty-first-century liberties to the max, refusing to succumb to an inner censor that resists exposure to what makes the sensitive uncomfortable. Love and lust, infatuation and infidelity, all the deep-down primal urges — Douglas Glover tackles every instinct with a bizarre spin or a brutal twist. This gifted author transfixes his audience with the unthinkable, drawing word pictures that some may prefer not to see in the middle of a lonely night. Illuminating.... 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." -- Julia Ann Charpentier *
ForeWord *
"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." -- Susan G. Cole *
Now *
"
Savage Love is an accomplished, funny, and inventive book that readers should rejoice in. . . . He's also a master of shifting between moods and modes . . . Through it all, the timing (so essential to comic writing), point of view, and diversity of language is near perfect. . . . By any measure,
Savage Love deserves to be recognized as one of the best Canadian books published this year." -- Alex Good *
Quill & Quire *
"Every story in
Savage Love is outrageous, creating farce — and something beautiful — out of human foibles." *
Now *
"
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." * inkwellbook.blogspot.ca *
"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." -- Chris Benjamin *
Atlantic Books Today *
"
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
