sewn paper
Fiction
1991
260 pages
ISBN 0-88984-119-5
$11.95
The Isolation Booth
Hugh Hood
The Isolation Booth is the third volume in Hugh
Hood's Collected Stories; it contains short
fiction written between 1957 and 1966.
While all of the stories have been previously published in various
magazines, this is the first time they are available in book form.
The title story was first published in The Tamarack
Review in 1958; the $28 paid to Hood for
that story represents the first income he ever made from his writing.
Since then, Hugh Hood has become `one of Canada's most prolific
short-story writers and
novelists.' (William French, The Globe & Mail)
He has authored more than twenty books, including
novels, short-story collections and essays. The Porcupine's Quill
has previously published Flying
a Red Kite and A Short Walk in the Rain
as part of our continuing series of Hood's
Collected Stories.
The stories in this collection are varied in form and
content, from `The Isolation Booth', which
Hood describes in his introduction as
`... typical media folklore,
the tale of a human sacrifice', to
`The Fable of the Ant and the
Grasshopper' which is concerned with the moral: `Never oppress
the shiftless and the idle; they may have powerful friends.'
These stories reflect the variety of Hood's
experiments with the form, as well as his continuing
concern with the human condition, which prompted William Blackburn
to comment, `Hood's thirty-year career demonstrates
his profound and compassionate sensitivity to
our human predicament.' (Canadian Book
Review Annual)
As Hood writes in the
introduction to The Isolation Booth,
`Surely the society that invents a space called "the
isolation booth" isn't far removed from the
subliminal motivations of the torturers in prisons and
camps of one kind or another. I've always
shuddered remembering the phrase, yet it was in
common use among millions of weekly viewers of
big-money TV quiz programmes like
"The $64,000 Question".' These concerns are (unfortunately)
as meaningful now as when `The
Isolation Booth' was written in 1958.
`Hood writes that this volume is the result of his unending
struggle with the short-story form. It is exciting to watch him triumph
in that struggle, as he accurately paints such diverse portraits as those
of a crass game-show host; a stuffy self-deceptive businessman; a shockingly insensitive
divorcé and a distinguished teacher of metaphysics and phenomenology.' `Storytelling is not only a gift, but a craft that evolves during the course
of a writer's life. The Isolation Booth, Hugh Hood's collection of stories never published in
book form before, is an interesting example of such an evolution.' `Hood at his best has created visions as strong as this. Long after his stories
and his characters have drained from my memory I can recall certain intensely realized mystical images - the ghost ship
under the lake, the return to life of a human being frozen to the point of death in some horrible
concentration-camp "medical" experiment, and above all that red kite of his, fluttering
triumphantly over a fallen world.'
- Canadian Book Review Annual
- Kingston Whig-Standard
- Essays on Canadoan Writing
Photo by Noreen Mallory
His work includes: Flying a Red Kite (1962), White Figure, White Ground (1964), You Cant Get There From Here (1972), Black and White Keys (1980), The Motor Boys in Ottawa (1986), which won the first annual QSPELL Award, and You'll Catch Your Death (1992).
Hugh Hood was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1988.