sewn paper
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Author
Fiction
1983
ISBN 0-88984-082-2
$9.95
Towers at the Edge
of a World
Virgil Burnett
`Here are the annals of Montarnis from the Dark Ages
to the present, told as a series of short stories,
with that form's characteristic twist - novel, ironic,
or terrifying - at the end. Their style is decadent,
both in their careful observation of literary artifice
and the expression of a strange private
sensibility.'
- Thomas Pyne, The Los
Angeles Times
`... fifteen loosely interwoven tales centred on
the ancient, walled town of Montarnis ... the stuff of
which legends are made, simple human action
embellished and distorted by passion and despair.'
- Alison Griffiths, Quill
and Quire
`Virgil Burnett's tales ... create a palpable
ancientness, a continual unease, and build toward
scenes of astonishing fantasy.'
- Richard Wilbur
`Deceptively fast-paced, swift without ever
becoming simple, the narrative carries one forward
through scenes sometimes of barbaric splendour and
horror to an often ironic and astonishing
denouement...'
- Daryl Hine
`...it has something to say about husbands, wives,
humour, places, and the various colours of
sexuality.'
- Anatole Broyard, The New
York Times
`But the reader should beware ... Burnett has
breathed life into his village of Montarnis, but
poison runs in its veins; it is beautiful but
pestilent.'
- Bernadette Ward, The
South Bend Tribune
`Towers at the Edge of a World is a perverse
mad dream of rebirth and renewal by a remarkably
sensitive artist.'
- Joan Murray,
Macleans
In 1984, the Porcupine's Quill published Burnett's illustrated novel A Comedy of Eros. You can find Burnett's artwork on the covers of other PQL books, too, including The Porcupine's Quill Reader and Endeared by Dark (the collected poems of George Johnston).
Photo by Sandie
Szczepanowski
Burnett was born in Kansas in 1928. He studied at Columbia University in New York and at the University of California in Berkeley. He spent time in Europe in the 1950s, first as an artist-illustrator with a propaganda company (he had been drafted in 1950), and later under the auspices of a Fulbright scholarship. He has returned to the continent to work and travel many times since. He now lives in southern Ontario, where for years he taught in the fine arts department at the University of Waterloo.