About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
Description
The Day of the Dead: Sliver Fictions, Short Stories & An Homage is a series of collisions between genders in the realms of sexuality, relationships, art and grief in three sections: Men & Women, Muses and The Dead. Owen explores secrecies, abject pasts, misunderstood desires, the urgency to create and the horrors of loss. The Day of the Dead takes the reader into discomforting worlds, thorned with fantasy and dark humour but rooted in the harsh and sometimes beautiful realities a woman and artist can face in 21st century society. Like the subtitle connotes, Owen's "sliver fictions" are short and sharp, unapologetically getting caught within inconvenient areas of the heart and mind. Familiar settings, like the cafeteria of a BC ferry, are made unheimlich, or uncanny, with the choice of conversation by strangers, or the memory of a character's early sexual experiences. Interactions between boys, girls, ghosts, men, women and all sorts of bystander animals make for brief but elaborate tales twisted into hauntingly confounding shapes and angles.
Contributor Notes
Catherine Owen lives in New Westminster, BC. She is the author of ten collections of poetry, among them, Designated Mourner (ECW, 2014), Trobairitz (Anvil Press 2012), Seeing Lessons (Wolsak & Wynn 2010) and Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009). Her poems are included in several recent anthologies such as Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC (Mothertongue Press, 2013) and This Place a Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone (Caitlin Press, 2014). Stories have appeared in Urban Graffiti, Memwear Magazine, Lit N Image (US) and Toronto Quarterly. Her collection of memoirs and essays is called Catalysts: Confrontations with the Muse (W & W, 2012). Frenzy won the Alberta Book Prize and other collections have been nominated for the BC Book Prize, ReLit, the CBC Prize, and the George Ryga Award. In 2015, Wolsak & Wynn published her compendium on the practices of writing called The Other 23 and a Half Hours or Everything You Wanted to Know That Your MFA Didn’t Teach You. She works in TV, plays metal bass and blogs at Marrow Reviews.
Awards
- Short-listed, ReLit Award
Editorial Review
“These intense snapshots, portraits of women (and some men) at the edge, throw an unflinching light on intimacy’s dark, twisted and hungry moments. This is as macabre a festival of sex and death as any Day of the Dead aficionado could wish for – yet shot through with a striking, deadpan humour”
— Shaena Lambert, author of Oh, My Darling and Radiance
