Hitting the Charts

Leon Rooke: Leon Rooke is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, editor and critic. He was born in rural North Carolina, but has been a resident of Canada for many years. He has published 28 books, and nearly 300 short stories have been published. Over the course of his career, Leon Rooke has been writer-in-residence at numerous North American universities, including the University of Victoria, Southwest Minnesota State University and the University of Toronto. Rooke is also the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1981), the Governor General's Award for English Language Fiction for Shakespeare's Dog (1985), and the North Carolina Award for Literature (1990). John Metcalf: John Metcalf was Senior Editor at the Porcupine's Quill until 2005, and is now Fiction Editor at Biblioasis. A scintillating writer and an almost magisterial editor and anthologist, he is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including Standing Stones: Selected Stories, Adult Entertainment, Going Down Slow and Kicking Against the Pricks. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, Myrna.

"The theatrical quality of Rooke's stories, combined with his merciless attention to form, presents the reader with a corrective to plot-driven, stale prose."&#8212Danforth Review "He is the high-priest of maximalist panache, the standard-bearer for a hyper-rhetoric that is at once strange, eccentric, and beautiful."&#8212Douglas Glover "He can break your heart in half all at once, like a kindly assassin, or chop it to bits with a dozen swift, sure strokes. He's a writer with a black belt in portraying the small daily tragedies that break bones and leave no visible wounds. It's when he's funny, which he often is, that he's most dangerous."&#8212Russel Banks