From Publishers Weekly
At once wandering and pithy, these 12 stories by Canadian writer Glover (The Life and Times of Captain N., etc.) are sophisticated, darkly comic meditations on love and disenchantment. "Iglaf and Swan" unsentimentally chronicles the downward spiral of the eponymous lovers, would-be poets in Toronto who marry, have a child, then separate, realizing wryly that "we fall in love with each other's failings, with our own vulnerabilities mirrored in the other." "La Corriveau" begins with a woman in Quebec City waking up in bed next to a dead man she doesn't know; though nonplussed, she stoically gathers clues to explain the situation while musing incongruously (yet appealingly) about the history of the city. "Why I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes" tells of an aborted suicide attempt by a young woman disappointed by her inadequate rapport with her boyfriend. Her theft of cyanide from a university lab culminates in a near-slapstick, bitterly funny finale. "My Romance," which begins with the death of a couple's three-month-old son, comes closer to tragedy, though it, too, has elements of farce: after an interlude at a cheap motel with the baby's doctor, the husband takes a wild ATV ride with the motel owners' drunken son. Glover has a delightful epigrammatic flair ("Hell, our army won't even consider fighting a country where the people can afford shoes anymore"; "My wife and I decide to separate, and then suddenly we are almost happy together") and a startlingly prescient take on affairs of the heart. Unevenly paced but brilliant in spots, these stories are loopy, loping delights. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Frederick Busch
"His language is crisp, taut, and true, and he ought to be read in the context of Beckett and Cortázar."

Andrea Barrett
"These inventive, darkly funny stories move between the poles of sex and death"

Darin Strauss
"Douglas Glover is a writer of the greatest and most variegated gifts."

Kirkus Reviews
"Sad, sexy, and significant." (starred review)

Book Description
In BAD NEWS OF THE HEART, a seeing-eye dog leads a blind man into a frozen river, a southern Baptist loses his memory and finds true love in Bel Air, an obese dot.com executive has "anorgasmic" latex sex with her CEO, and a homeless man in New York creates an intellectual universe based on Stick ’em notes stuck to the inside of his cardboard box shelter. Douglas Glover’s stories are wildly inventive, deadpan comedies of our universal human catastrophe. They are sly, demanding and wise—stories about language, desire and love (in a very dark place). The humor veers from the wry and sardonic to salacious, mordant and playful. And always there are moments of such stark emotional intimacy that the reader slides, almost without noticing, from laughter to lament.

About the Author
Dougls Glover is the author of three novels and four short story collections, including THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CAPTAIN N. and A GuIDE TO ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR, which was a Governor General's Award finalist. He is also the author of a collection of essays, NOTES HOME FROM A PRODIGAL SON, and currently teaches at Vermont College.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Bad News of the Heart, a seeing-eye dog leads a blind man into a frozen river, a southern Baptist loses his memory and finds true love in Bel Air, an obese dot.com executive has "anorgasmic" latex sex with her CEO, a homeless man in New York creates an intellectual universe based on post-it notes stuck to the inside of his cardboard box shelter.

Douglas Glover's stories are wildly inventive, deadpan comedies of our universal human catastrophe. They are sly, demanding and wise—stories about language, desire and love (in a very dark place). The humor veers from the wry and sardonic to salacious, mordant and playful. And always there are moments of such stark emotional intimacy that the reader slides, almost without noticing, from laughter to lament.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

At once wandering and pithy, these 12 stories by Canadian writer Glover (The Life and Times of Captain N., etc.) are sophisticated, darkly comic meditations on love and disenchantment. "Iglaf and Swan" unsentimentally chronicles the downward spiral of the eponymous lovers, would-be poets in Toronto who marry, have a child, then separate, realizing wryly that "we fall in love with each other's failings, with our own vulnerabilities mirrored in the other." "La Corriveau" begins with a woman in Quebec City waking up in bed next to a dead man she doesn't know; though nonplussed, she stoically gathers clues to explain the situation while musing incongruously (yet appealingly) about the history of the city. "Why I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes" tells of an aborted suicide attempt by a young woman disappointed by her inadequate rapport with her boyfriend. Her theft of cyanide from a university lab culminates in a near-slapstick, bitterly funny finale. "My Romance," which begins with the death of a couple's three-month-old son, comes closer to tragedy, though it, too, has elements of farce: after an interlude at a cheap motel with the baby's doctor, the husband takes a wild ATV ride with the motel owners' drunken son. Glover has a delightful epigrammatic flair ("Hell, our army won't even consider fighting a country where the people can afford shoes anymore"; "My wife and I decide to separate, and then suddenly we are almost happy together") and a startlingly prescient take on affairs of the heart. Unevenly paced but brilliant in spots, these stories are loopy, loping delights. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A Canadian author of three novels, including The Life and Times of Captain N., twice nominated for Canada's Governor General's Award, Glover returns with a collection of 12 short stories that stretch the limits of authorial invention. Writing in a consistently deadpan style, he presents us with such scenarios as a homeless man whose world consists of Post-it notes stuck to the inside of a cardboard box, a blind man and his dog walking into a frozen river, and an obituary writer who exercises an uncanny influence on the lives around him. The common thread in the stories is an urgent, energetic writing style and an unblinking focus on the human condition in extremis. Glover is a revelation, and he deserves to be more widely known in the States. Recommended for any collection that seeks a representative sample of world or North American fiction.-Philip Santo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A dozen stories, culled from collections first published in Canada, that straddle the line between sadness and sadism. The recurring theme is the carnal appetite of the lonely-and the inevitable poor consequences that result when that appetite is sated. "Iglaf and Swan" follows the bitter, failed careers and marriage of a pair of poets caught up in their own lusts and intellectualisms as they give birth to a daughter doomed to suicide: "They only wished that the moment could go on, that they could always feel this important, tragic and redeemed." The same story warns: "This is a dark story, growing darker still," and so goes the collection. The failure of tortured romance may find its best metaphor when a blind man falls into a river and a dog tries to save him ("Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon"). "A Guide to Animal Behavior" is a brief account of lives and morals so mislaid they can only be represented by fragments and non-sequiturs. The title piece consists of "the eternal triangle: recently released mental patient, woman and other woman from down the hall," but the dynamics are unusual, with the group finding redemption as the mental patient narrator seduces his two women with stories of a life not lived. A family's ghosts, meanwhile, in "A True Piece of the Cross," take on tangible character as an old summerhouse comes to represent all the unspeakable secrets attendant upon filial love. Glover's (The Life and Times of Captain N., 1993, etc.) mannered tales are often quite self-conscious in their telling, aware that they are fabrications of an emergent truth stronger than simple fact. Perhaps the author is too often reliant on aberrant sexual behavior for tension, butneedlessly-these stories draw their power from a deeper source. Sad, sexy, and significant.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

His language is crisp, taut, and true, and he ought to be read in the context of Beckett and Cort￯﾿ﾽzar. — Frederick Busch

These inventive, darkly funny stories move between the poles of sex and death. — Andrea Barrett