Your cart is currently empty!
First Fiction Fridays: Love at Last Sight by Thea Bowering
Love at Last Sight marks the official debut of a fascinating and vital voice in Canadian literature. By taking the figure of the flaneur, the 19th Century gentleman-poet who strolls the streets looking for adventure, and making him a woman, Thea Bowering puts a whole new spin on how we look at the urban milieu, both in the Old World and the New. With an excellent eye for detail, she breaks down the differences between European and Prairie living.
What:
Love at Last Sight (NeWest Press, 2013)
Who:
Thea Bowering has been published in The Capilano Review, Matrix, Dandelion, Vancouver Sun, and Scandinavian Canadian Studies. A native of Vancouver, she now makes her home in Edmonton, Alberta.
Why you need to read this now:
Love at Last Sight marks the official debut of a fascinating and vital voice in Canadian literature. By taking the figure of the flâneur, the 19th Century gentleman-poet who strolls the streets looking for adventure, and making him a woman, Thea Bowering puts a whole new spin on how we look at the urban milieu, both in the Old World and the New. With an excellent eye for detail, she breaks down the differences between European and Prairie living.
Bowering’s varied life experience as a world traveller, bartender, student, and lover of art shines through every story in this collection, and an irresistible mix of touring musicians, dandies, assassins, barroom down-and-outers, Russian novelists and more populate its pages. The stories in Love at Last Sight unfold like a metatexual game, where Roland Barthes rubs shoulders with Duran Duran, and Bulgakov and Tolstoy knock a few back with Joy Division and Fellini.
*****
Love at Last Sight spills with witty, intelligent stories that sneakily uncover the secret rococo in the everyday. Bowering’s gift makes her version of the familiar frightening but still desirable, unexpected and funny. Every story in this collection is a jewel.”
— Suzette Mayr, author of Monoceros and Venous Hum
“This stellar debut collection of stories—mercurial, polished, philosophical, funny—is a series of histoires d’amour set in the bars and streets of urban Edmonton, written with multiple ironic voices. Thea Bowering has a knack for locating the instabilities of the literary present in these gifted, lively tales about memory and perception, love and conduct.”
— Sharon Thesen, author of The Good Bacteria and A Pair of Scissors
“Thea Bowering’s comprehension and skill with the short story is extremely enticing. Love at Last Sight is a wonderful display of a finely balanced poetic intelligence applied to this narrative form. The stories are full of books and authors, mythological, and personal echoes; Roland Barthes, Robert Kroetsch, her own upbringing in the midst of an intense literary household, frame a vibrant pastiche of biofiction. Her craft with the paragraph, that hard nut to crack in writing prose, is one of the best I’ve seen in Canadian fiction. Bowering’s project here is to use the story as an innovative witness to the range and magnetism of her own moment.”
— Fred Wah, author of Diamond Grill and Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate
*****
Learn more about Love at Last Sight:
-
  Â
- Read Thea’s interview with the Edmonton Arts Council   Â
- Check out photos from the launch at the Empress Ale House in Edmonton   Â
- Read an interview with the Edmonton Journal‘s books columnist Michael Hingston   Â
- Watch a video of Thea reading from the book
Follow NeWest on Facebook and Twitter to hear about Thea’s upcoming events and news!
*****
Thanks to NeWest Press for sharing this great new author with us!
_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog
