Susannah M. Smith Livres

Fiction. Structured as a series of interconnected galleries, THE FAIRY TALE MUSEUM is a curiosity-cabinet-as-novel that showcases the original, spectacular, grotesque, endearing, and otherworldly. You'll meet bird-headed lovers, a cyborg cyclops, a fortune teller, revolutionary ventriloquists' dummies, a narcoleptic vampire, Eros and Thanatos, and a host of woodland creatures. This is a book that celebrates hybrids, creativity, and transformation--a manifesto against putting ourselves into boxes that limit who we can be and what is possible. "THE FAIRY TALE MUSEUM has more in common with installation art than with any traditional literary genres... this book is] an exercise in encouraging creativity."--Rain Taxi "In THE FAIRY TALE MUSEUM, Susannah M. Smith has crafted a world as seemingly scenic and romantic as a snow globe--except this world can break, it can draw blood, and it can transform. This is a beautiful book, its beauty only deepened by its bite."--Derek McCormack "In Susannah M. Smith's fantastical, moody folkloric menagerie, you can wander slowly and savour, or leap randomly between surprising exhibits. Part Brothers Grimm and part Doktor Bey, part novel and part poem, THE FAIRY TALE MUSEUM is a moving, exquisite sensory experience. This is an exciting book."--Stuart Ross

Minor earthquakes every day; that's what they say. Lucy feels the tremors like a needle sensitized to respond to the slightest movement. She feels the push, the blind thrust of the earth's elastic body, pushing out, pulling in, behaving unpredictably. She lies awake at night, staring into the darkness, thinking of the tectonic plates moving against one another, building up tension, until something has to give.On an isolated island in Lake Ontario live twins Lucy and Levi and their father, Daniel. While Daniel desperately mourns for his dead wife, Levi and Lucy grow up ever more entwined in their enchanted childhood of fairy tales and rhymes.But when a fissure in the fragile cocoon of the family explodes into a chasm, each of the three is hurled in a different direction. Soon, there emerges a geographical triangle – Vancouver, Montreal, the island – that also maps out the terrain of love and the territory of family.Part Egyptian myth, part Alice in Wonderland, How the Blessed Live is an ethereally quiet, unexpected debut from a novelist to be watched.