Winner, 2011 ReLit Award

From the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, Ravenna Gets is a new collection of “wheeled” stories that continue the author’s exploration of “apocalypse fiction.”

In a single convulsion of homicide, the population of Ravenna tries to erase the population of Collingwood. The innocent, standing in their living rooms, cooking in their kitchens, and playing in their yards, are simply checked off by hunting rifles or crossed out by farmers’ tools.

There is one thing missing, however, as the bodies fall from what might have been better stories, better novels, and it’s this: everything.

Praise for Ravenna Gets:

“Tony Burgess sits in infinite judgement on rural Ontario life, insisting with infuriating calmness that not even one fine red curly hair separates the poetry of mundane existence from sudden, inexplicable violence. Ravenna Gets belongs on the same shelf as Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip and Springsteen’s Nebraska.” (Darren Wershler, author of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and, with Bill Kennedy, Update)

“… out on the edge and experimental to the point of reader-confusion, but surprisingly alluring. When taking a reader to the cliff edge, then the writing must be as enticing as chocolate even if the story smells bad. I don’t get it and I didn’t enjoy it, but I couldn’t look away: This poetic, fast-flying nihilistic narrative of carnage is well done.” (The Globe & Mail)

“The world of Tony Burgess is savage and blackly funny. After all, he wrote the CanLit zombie classic Pontypoool Changes Everything. It’s a place where you shouldn’t trust anybody, not even your narrator. This is not Alice Munro’s small-town Canada.

“Burgess rips open the guts of Canadian literature, thankfully: someone’s got to do it. (Uptown Magazine)