Cosmo

An admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a three-thousand word sentence in defence of his passion. Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal stupefying desert of the soul. An aging porn star dons a grotesque dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of his life. Such are the speakers and stars in a colection of stories that explodes the conventions of short fiction. Though shifting wildly in tone, structure and perspective from one page to the next, each of these nine mercurial stories is drenched in pop culture, the distancing effects of modern communication and the malaise of solitary existence. At its core, these stories are a portrait of ordinary people (as well as celebrities – they're just like us!) striving, thinking and suffering alone. “Winner of the 2013 CBC Overlookie Bookie Award for Most Underrated Canadian Book'Cosmo succeeds not only as a well-wrought and keenly written collection of narratives, but also as a work of analysis … a rare book in that it is brave enough to explore the ways in which being loved in private has a very real counterpoint in public, in the form of fame, public identity and cultural cache. In doing so, Gordon dissects the very idea of the authentic in an increasingly public world in which the self is ever more constructed.' – National Post'Though offering a gaudy all-you-can-eat spread of pop/junk cultural references, the book selects its menu wisely, hitting both the salad bar and the sundae counter in equal measures, as it were … the care and craft of these stories, both in their form and in prose [is] playfully enthusiastic and digressive, yet rarely overstuffed, burrowing into the knottiness of humanity while avoiding the hazards of total schmaltz. For example, he would likely do much better with a half-assed buffet metaphor than was attempted above.' – HTML?Giant