Aquarium

	sewn paper Fiction / Stories October 1999 152 pages ISBN 0-88984-209-4 $15.95 e-mail the Author Search by Title Search by Author News & Events Alumni To order Order Direct	Aquarium Mike Barnes Movement is the key to this collection. The settings for the stories in Aquarium range from metropolis to hamlet, from a Florida retirement community to a northern Ontario reserve on the brink of freeze-up. The people in Aquarium are as varied as its locales; the characters are landlords, actors, drinkers, painters, teachers, doctors, steelworkers, fishermen, students, shopkeepers, weathermen, clerks and security guards. Couples are a recurrent theme: the dreams and devices by which lovers join or drift apart. `... fiercely alive, marked by a sharp, unerring eye for detail and a wonderful way with metaphors.' - The Toronto Star, Best of '99 `Mike Barnes brings to Aquarium a deceptively relaxed precision and a grown-up acceptance of puzzlement as a natural state of mind.' - Bonnie Burnard, citation for Danuta Gleed Literary Award. `Barnes chooses his narrative turns with delicacy, avoiding high drama and epiphanies in favour of keen, incremental observation of his characters.' - The Globe and Mail `The majority of even the best small presses produce their fair share of - how to put it in these oh-so delicate times? - aesthetically challenged books. This is to be expected. Every legitimate literary press attempts to produce enduring novels and books of short stories, but the small press attempts to do this and more: to send out into the mostly-indifferent world writers who are proncipally unknown, voices that need to be heard if the naturally atrophying effect of ``good'' literary taste is to be freshly attacked and challenged. `Many are called, few are chosen. John Metcalf, however, the editor of The Porcupine's Quill, the well-regarded small press based in Erin, near Guelph, is exceptional in not only the number of now well-known writers he's introduced - Steven Heighton, Russell Smith, Andrew Pyper and Michael Winter among them - but, maybe even more impressively, virtually every book he acquires and sees through publication possesses both a high degree of technical competence and an earnest thematic reach. (And they're always handsomely printed by Porcupine's Quill itself, a rewarding rarity.) Even if Metcalf's editorial predilection is fairly narrowly realistic, his writers always know what they're doing and the stories they tell are always about something that matters: the human heart. One never puts down fiction from the Porcupine's Quill thinking only, ``Why?'' ' - Ray Robertson, Toronto Star

	Photo by Heather R Simcoe	Mike Barnes is the author of Calm Jazz Sea (Brick Books 1996), a collection of poems shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His stories and poems have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Anthology 11 and 99: Best Canadian Stories. His first novel, The Syllabus was released in 2002.

Contents © 2003 The Porcupine's Quill, Inc. - Updated: 13 September 2003 by Tim Inkster
The Porcupine's Quill, 68 Main Street, Erin, Ontario CANADA N0B 1T0
Telephone (519) 833-9158 Fax (519) 833-9845 e-mail pql@sentex.net

The Porcupine's Quill is remarkable in Canadian publishing in that most of the physical production
of our books is completed in-house at the shop on the Main Street of Erin Village.

We print on a twenty-five inch Heidelberg KORD, typically onto acid-free Zephyr Antique laid.
The sheets are then folded, and sewn into signatures on a 1907 model Smyth National Book Sewing machine.