Best Canadian Stories 11
Oberon Press released the forty-fifth edition of Best Canadian Stories on January 12th, 2012. The story "That Time of Year" from The End of the Ice Age is part of the 2011 anthology.(Cover art by James Ensor)
The End of the Ice Age, launched April 25th, 2010, was published by Biblioasis. Many thanks to Dan Wells, John Metcalf and Dennis Priebe for all their help. (Launch photos)
"Contrary to the codes of cliché, there’s more to men at midlife than Ferraris and pharmaceuticals. In his fifth book, the excellent short story collection The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young trains his sharp eye on the tricky state of being between young and old. His meaningful stories catalogue an array of possible experiences that reach beyond the platitudes so heavily relied upon by lazy advertisers, and reveal more nuance than can be expressed in 30 seconds."
---Mark Paterson, The Rover (Read the full review here.)
"Young's style owes something to the hard-boiled prose of postwar American writers. His stories move confidently. Their pacing is swift yet attentive. They tend to be strongest when the material is most difficult. Mole evokes the terrible availability, even mundanity, of acts of violence. The almost elegiac tone suits the long suffering of its characters, left beautifully understated. The less spoken, the more said. "
--- Julian Gunn, The Ottawa Citizen (read the full review here)
"Young’s minimalist style and stark realism are nonetheless Carver-like. His stories are also gritty and precise, with touches of poetic prose, without much resolution. If you’re one of these old fashioned folk who want to like the protagonists in your stories, you’re in trouble."
--- Cherie Thiessen, ABC Bookworld (Read the full review here)
"Young’s ability to create an engrossing world in ten or fifteen pages, one that convincingly constructs a range of characters, is impressive. A seamless flow backward and forward through time, the deft plucking of the right detail, a spare prose that doesn’t read thin, and conversational exchanges that ring true are some of the qualities that allow the stories to achieve their effect. Rolex makes a watch called The Oyster. The Oyster’s precursor was called The Hermetic. Like the famous watch, Young’s stories exhibit a compact richness. Their progression is the skilled insertion of the blade that pries open the watch case, the oyster’s carapace, the hermetically sealed outer shell that people routinely present to one another. Revealed are the complex and vulnerable inner workings in motion."
--- Lachlan Murray, for The Vancouver Writers Festival. Full review online here or under Reviews.
"Terence Young’s fifth book (and second short story collection) lulls you with the
everyday and the seemingly mundane and then you get crushed by something so real that
you curse out loud and even though the librarian might throw you out you keep reading."
--- Carte Blanche
"There is beauty, manifest beauty, in the prose: stamped with a Metcalfian imprint, the writing sometimes draws the reader up short with its force, its multi-valence, the poignancy of what the characters are saying to one another. A particular strength of Young’s is how convincingly he writes about marriage and long-term attachment: all the relationships in his stories are tough, and fierce,, and depressingly erosional. He creates a view of entire lives spent together in just a few sentences, and the effect is levelling. One can’t help but say, These people choose to live this way. And that they do seems entirely fitting."
--- Shane Neilsen, The Fiddlehead, Spring 2011
--- Shane Neilsen, The Fiddlehead, Spring 2011
