I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457

Finalist for the City of Hamilton literary awards

At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin’s latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world.Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin’s stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, “what makes them so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.”

Praise for I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457:

“Barwin and publisher Anvil Press have taken a risk here, and the result is a book that is unabashedly and delightfully odd … though your brain is sure to be confounded by the weirdness on display, the tone is playful; the weird is meant to allow your logic centre to relax and be receptive to these ideas, and in this way you are left open to experience something profound, moving, and often pretty funny.” (The Winnipeg Free Press)

“There’s so much to love in I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457. Each story is a portal into a wondrous and mysterious parallel world. Like the great U.S. poet, Russell Edson, Gary Barwin’s work inhabits a transcendent country, one in which surprise, delight, discovery, and, above all, gleeful imagination rule the day.” (M.A.C. Farrant, author of The World Afloat and Darwin Alone in the Universe)

“These stories are as unexpected as they are beautiful. Each one will have you seeing the world in a slightly different way.” (Andrew Kaufman, author of All My Best Friends are Superheroes and Born Weird)

AUTHOR

Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary artist and the author of 26 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long-listed for Canada Reads.

A PhD in music composition, Barwin has been Writer-in-Residence at University of Toronto (Scarborough), Laurier, Western University, McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library, Hillfield Strathallan College, Sheridan College and Young Voices E-Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library. He has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, to at-risk youth in Hamilton through the ArtForms program and currently mentors through the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. His writing has been published in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally and his writing, music, media works and visuals have been presented and broadcast internationally. Though born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Ashenazi descent, Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.