Cynthia Flood and her publisher, Biblioasis, mentioned in Quill and Quire
THE STALWART If there is a gold standard for Canadian short fiction in the new millennium, it’s probably set by Biblioasis. The press has been at the forefront, season after season, of producing collections by some of the finest practitioners of the form, both veterans and newcomers. Nancy Jo Cullen, Alexander MacLeod, Rebecca Rosenblum, C.P. Boyko, Ray Smith, Alice Petersen, Kathleen Winter, Leon Rooke, Terry Griggs, Amy Jones: these authors, newly published or brought back into print, have found a champion and stalwart advocate in the small indie press out of Windsor, Ontario.
One writer Biblioasis has shown a strong affinity for is Cynthia Flood. The pieces in Flood’s previous collection, The English Stories, published by Biblioasis in 2009, “consistently delight for their careful craft and thematic intricacy, but especially for their attention to language,” wrote Lynda Grace Philippsend in The Globe and Mail. Q&Q feature reviewer, James Grainger wrote that the collection “achieve[s] a brooding resonance that captures the literal and spiritual dampness of a provincial scene that all but died out with the last remnants of the British Empire.”
Flood’s subtlety and linguistic care earn her comparisons to Alice Munro, as does her frequent subject: the lives of girls and women. These lives are on display in Flood’s forthcoming collection, Red Girl Rat Boy ($19.95pa., Sept.), which traverses a series of registers and approaches – Gothic, nauralistic, uncanny, subversive – to form the latest addition to an impressive and growing library of short fiction from this determined and discerning house.
Excerpted from Quill and Quire, July 24, 2013, p24
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