Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Introducing Mike Barnes's The Reasonable Ogre


One of the titles I'm most excited about this Spring is Mike Barnes's new collection The Reasonable Ogre: Tales for the Sick and Well.  Officially this is his third collection of short stories, following Aquarium and Contrary Angel.  But this is different for a range of reasons.  First, Mike has turned his pen to fables with this one, and has collected together  thirteen fables about the hard bargains, small plenties, luscious dregs and strange detours which make life worth living.  In many ways these fables serve as a fictional follow-up to his memoir The Lily Pond as much as anything else he has written.  It is also fabulously illustrated with more than sixty full page and vignette illustrations by Segbingway.  We're in the proofing stage now, and the book will not launch until late April, but it is such a wonderfully unique book I thought it would be worth giving Thirsty readers a bit of an advanced notice.


If you would like a sneak peak of some of what you'll get when we launch The Reasonable Ogre in a few months' time you can check out the new website we've launched to promote the book at www.reasonable ogre.com  There you can see a selection of Segbingway's illustrations, read a sample from the title fable, or listen to Mike read the entirety of the same fable, and samples from a few others.


We'll keep you posted about Toronto and Southern-Ontario launches forthcoming in April/May.


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