Douglas Glover
DOUGLAS GLOVER has published four novels, five story collections, and three works of nonfiction. In 2005 his novel Elle was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2003 he won the Governor-General's Award for Fiction. His most recent book is Savage Love (short stories, 2013). He edited the annual Best Canadian Stories from 1996 to 2006. He published the literary magazine Numéro Cinq from 2010-2017.
Shameless
By Douglas GloverWhen she was eight years old, Megan Strehle conceived an unnatural passion for Tamas Preltz, a fifteen-year-old apprentice butcher in the town where her father took vegetables to the local farmers’ market. She would beg her father to bring her along when he loaded his Ford half-ton pickup with cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, summer squash, beans and brussels sprouts.
Crown of Thorns
By Douglas GloverWhen Tobin was eight, he fell in love with his babysitter Aganetha, the awkward one with the large, damp eyes, floppy, uncontrollable bosoms and a soot-coloured hair-wing she kept pulled down over her face to hide her acne.
Money
By Douglas GloverDrebel started when he was fourteen organizing a grocery shopping service for the elderly in his neighborhood. He charged a flat rate per bag, accepted gratuities, and handled the cash exchange between the grocery store and the old people.
Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought
By Douglas GloverIn the third book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, Moses is herding his father-in-law’s sheep on a hillside when the Lord erupts in sheet of flame from a nearby bush. The author presents the scene as a scientific impossibility: the bush burns furiously without actually burning up.
The Cursed Hunter in the Red Lands (January 1836)
By Douglas GloverHe remembers this: in January four Years now, my little niece Rebecca Ann Burgin playing behind the Oxen at the horse Mill, bending to Grasp a shiny Stone when the Brace, which the Oxen pushed to, caught her Head against the outside Post & smashed it to pieces. She could not have felt but an instant’s Pain, yet the Sight of her were difficult to bear.
State of the Nation
By Douglas GloverWe in the Republic are exhausted. Our enemies have lain down their arms, leaving us suddenly without a national purpose. Brown people are pouring over the border to take up work we heedlessly relinquish in our pursuit of leisure and sexual gratification.
ESSAY
The Erotics of Restraint, or the Angel in the Novel: A Note on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
By Douglas Glover
Call this an act of piety and self-education. Academia has sacrificed entire forests to the altar of Jane Austen, and I am not likely to add one whit to the pile. But her novel Mansfield Park has been gnawing at me for two decades, ever since I taught it at Skidmore College to a class of privileged young people who might have walked out of its pages.
A Scrupulous Fidelity,
On Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser
By Douglas Glover
This essay is from Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing published by Biblioasis. Out in March.
