Book Description
Ground Works celebrates the innovators behind the unruly iconoclasm at work in Canada's best fiction. Sometime between the 1960s and 1980s Canadian society began unbuttoning itself, and our experimental writers helped loosen the threads. This anthology exhibits the first deep breaths. From Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers to John Riddell's Pope Leo El Elope (a tale that recounts a papal assassination, using only the letters E, L, O, and P) to the most radical écriture féminine of Audrey Thomas and Gail Scott, Ground Works displays Canadian writing as it's never been seen before. The idea for the anthology was Margaret Atwood's. She introduces Ground Works, and joins forces with avant-garde poet Christian Bök to collect the very best experimental fiction written in English between 1965 and 1985.

About the Author
Christian Bök is an academic and poet whose most recent book, Eunoia, won the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002. Margaret Atwood is one of the world's preeminent novelists and the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This anthology of Canadian experimental writers evokes the rich and unexpected heritage of current Canadian fiction. It contains groundbreakingly ruptured, side-splittingly excessive, weirdly lucid, and above all, endlessly interesting writing. Contributors include Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen, Graeme Gibson, Christopher Dewdney, George Bowering, and Matt Cohen, as well as innovators such as Ray Smith, J. Michael Yates, Gail Scott, Andreas Schroeder, Audrey Thomas, and Robert Zend.