Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Zsuzsi Gartner

Photo: Daylife.com

Writer-editor Zsuszi Gartner was born in Winnipeg and grew up a Calgarian.

Her new short story collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, was a 2011 Giller nominee.

Reviewing this book in the National Post, Jeet Heer summarizes the context of Alice Munro and then describes Gartner as the Anti-Munro.

That is, rather than the "green and hardy physical world" inhabited my Munro's characters, those of Gartner are "immersed in a completely technological environment."

Gartner is interested in speculative fiction, and she edited Darwin's Bastards, a short story collection (D & M 2010). Globe and Mail reviewer Micah Toub places Gartner and this book, along with Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland and William Gibson in "an important [futuristic] counter-tradition" that stands in opposition to CanLit's dominant historic fiction.

Other works by Zsuszi Gartner include All the Anxious Girls on Earth (Key Porter 1999) and various works in the Walrus and other magazines. Gartner was once the senior editor of Saturday Night and in 2007 she won a National Magazine Award for Fiction. A long-time reviewer for the Globe and Mail, she has also appeared on the CBC program Canada Reads.

In September 2011 she was interviewed by Michael Bryson in The Danforth Review.

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