sewn paper
e-mail the Author
Fiction/Literary
April 2001
208 pages
ISBN 0-88984-224-9
$19.95
Love Street
Susan PerlyYou have never read a book like Susan Perly's first novel Love Street.
Open it anywhere, and out comes the voice of Miss Mercy, late-night radio
DJ in New Orleans with her jive talk and old vinyl platters. Sam Cooke,
Percy Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Van Morrison, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell,
war, art, peacetime -- Miss Mercy talks to the lonely. She swings, she
bebops, growls, prays, plays blues, soul, jazz, R&B. Miss Mercy is
the modern woman of all ages. She is lo-fi, urban, mysterious. She is wacky,
she
cascades sheets of sound. Remember when you used to listen to a radio
under your pillow? Love Street is a radio novel from that world.
Miss Mercy -- the sultry vinyl pirate, the Mistress of the Mike -- aims
to seduce you. To remind you of the fun of words, to woo you back to the
love of reading.
`Love Street is Toronto writer Susan Perly's first book. In it she fuses her
experience as a war correspondent, her considerable opinions on a wide range of subjects
and a love of jazz to create the astonishing Miss Mercy. Beware when Miss Mercy says: ``Let
me be intimate with you.'' She means it. There is an intensity to her that embarrasses. You
wish you didn't know about her shingles or what happened in that elevator. You go to turn her off
but you can't, because she's funny, provocative and cool, because she knows the truth of
our condition.' Globe & Mail
`This is what midnight radio should sound like;
bluesy, sexy and cool.' Peter Goddard
`Susan Perly lays down a cool, existential get-it-off coda about jazz, sex
and digging the Holy Grail. This is Johnny Fever at Mach 2.' Peter C. Newman
Photo by Shelly Grimson
Perly's short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and in the anthology Hard Times. `Jesus and the Toucan' won second prize in the CBC Literary Competition in 1988 and was dramatized with Don Francks. It was her story, `1956: an excerpt' (about Thelonious Monk and Glenn Gould), which led to the use of jazz as both subject and model in her writing. She has performed parts of Love Street with jazz musicians in Toronto.
Susan Perly lives in Toronto with her husband, the poet Dennis Lee.