Douglas Glover is a distinguished member of the tribe of Nabokov — The Globe and Mail

The first big (the Toronto Globe and Mail) review of Savage Love, and it’s beautiful, intelligent, well-written and perceptive (if I do say so myself). I could not have asked for a better reading. I am touched. The reviewer knows my work well enough to gauge the differences between my last book of stories and this one, the modulations of theme, and so on. He does a wonderful job of illustrating the emotive range of the texts. It’s rare to get this kind of adult attention, let me tell you.

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Douglas Glover is a distinguished member of the tribe of Nabokov. Glover is as gifted a writer as Canada has ever produced and the source of his strength is the ferocious quirkiness of his sentences.

Glover’s new story collection, Savage Love, is an astonishing book only partly because of the loopy and incessant inventiveness of his narratives. The 22 stories range daringly in space and time, taking us from a stomach-turning battle scene during the War of 1812 to a contemporary farm family whose sheer wackiness, condensed into 25 pages, puts to shame any eccentric clan one can think of, whether it be J.D. Salinger’s Glass family or Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums.

These stories are rich in plot, full of love triangles, murders and descents into madness. The appalling events Glover describes might, in the hands of a lesser writer, seem like mere attention-grabbing sensationalism. Yet his stories leave a genuine emotional scar, because the words he uses are sharp enough to claw into us.

Read the rest at Douglas Glover comes out swinging, prose first – The Globe and Mail.