Finalist for the City of Hamilton literary awards

At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin's latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world.Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin's stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, "what makes them so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder."

Praise for I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457:

"Barwin and publisher Anvil Press have taken a risk here, and the result is a book that is unabashedly and delightfully odd ... though your brain is sure to be confounded by the weirdness on display, the tone is playful; the weird is meant to allow your logic centre to relax and be receptive to these ideas, and in this way you are left open to experience something profound, moving, and often pretty funny." (The Winnipeg Free Press)

"There's so much to love in I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457. Each story is a portal into a wondrous and mysterious parallel world. Like the great U.S. poet, Russell Edson, Gary Barwin's work inhabits a transcendent country, one in which surprise, delight, discovery, and, above all, gleeful imagination rule the day." (M.A.C. Farrant, author of The World Afloat and Darwin Alone in the Universe)

"These stories are as unexpected as they are beautiful. Each one will have you seeing the world in a slightly different way." (Andrew Kaufman, author of All My Best Friends are Superheroes and Born Weird)

The author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction and books for children, Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist from Hamilton, Ontario and the author of the nationally bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates (Penguin Random House Canada) which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award; and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019.)
A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature and has co-won the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Arts Award. He was one of the judges for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize. Barwin has been Writer-in-Residence at Western University, Hillfield Strathallan College and McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library. His writing and recordings have been published/released in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally—from Readers Digest to Granta. He is on the organizing committee for Hamilton’s LitLive Series and regularly presents, performs and exhibits in the city.

Gary Barwin's profile page