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Fiction Anthologies (multiple Authors)

Ground Works

Avant Garde for Thee

edited by Christian Bök

introduction by Margaret Atwood

Publisher
House of Anansi Press Inc
Initial publish date
Mar 2003
Category
Anthologies (multiple authors), Visionary & Metaphysical, Literary
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780887846915
    Publish Date
    Mar 2003
    List Price
    $22.95

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Out of print

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Description

A surreal array of beautiful anomalies, Ground Works celebrates the innovators behind the unruly iconoclasm at work in Canada's best fiction. The idea for the anthology was Margaret Atwood's. She introduces Ground Works, and joins forces with avant-garde poet Christian Bok to collect the very best experimental fiction written in English between 1965 and 1985.

Sometime between the 1960s and 1980s Canadian society began unbuttoning itself, and our experimental writers helped loosen the threads. This anthology exhibits the first deep breaths.From Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers to John Riddell's Pope Leo El Elope (a tale that recounts a papal assassination, using only the letters E, L, O, and P) to the most radical ecriture feminine of Audrey Thomas and Gail Scott, Ground Works displays Canadian writing as it's never been seen before.

About the authors

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a ’pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut, and ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Northwestern University Press, 2001). His book Eunoia won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and is the best-selling Canadian poetry book of all time. Bök has created artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. His conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He currently teaches at the University of Calgary.

Christian Bök's profile page


Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. 

Margaret Atwood's profile page

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