Berlin by Michael Mirolla
As wickedly funny and hilariously angry as vintage Harlan Ellison.-Spider Robinson, author of Callahan's Crosstime SaloonA delightful romp through the metaphysical muck.-Halifax Daily NewsA funny, tragic glimpse into the territory of the absurd, somewhere between Kafka and Vonnegut.-Calgary HeraldWeird and wonderful . . . imaginative, unsettling, devilishly layered. Mirolla delights in verbal and situational sleight-of-hand, exposing a disorienting world of labyrinthine dreams and menacing recurrent images. Mirolla likes the macabre and grotesque, absurdities and stylistic play. He mercilessly exposes our alienation and primal fears, forcing us to face the awful possibility that we are no more than the product of our own devising.-Event MagazineThe Berlin Wall falls. A continent away, a mysterious mental patient awakes from a two-year stupor. His obsession with Berlin is unexplained. His escape from the hospital launches a surreal adventure in which past blends with future, and death is used to change the fabric of the world in a freakish experiment on transcendental philosophy. Like Franz Kafka or Italo Calvino in their blending of the real and surreal, or like a psychedelic drug trip, this story brings the reader into West Berlin's seamy underlife-the omnipresent wall, transvestite bars, and sadomasochism. It is a secret world where a concentration-camp survivor sells gas stoves, a world of philosophical intelligentsia, adultery, and murder. Frenetic, kaleidoscopic, horrible, brilliant.Michael Mirolla, author of novels, short stories, poetry, and plays, lives in Toronto, Canada. His writing has won many awards and has appeared in numerous journals in Canada, the United States, Britain, and Italy.Novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright Michael Mirolla's publications include a punk-inspired novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; two novels: Berlin (a Bressani Prize winner as well as a finalist for the Indie Book and National Best Book Awards), and The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; three short-story collections: The Formal Logic of Emotion (translated into Italian), Hothouse Loves & Other Tales and The Giulio Metaphysics III; and three collections of poetry: Light and Time, the English-Italian bilingual Interstellar Distances / Distanze Interstellari, and 2013's Bressani-Award-winner The House on 14th Avenue. A new collection of short stories, Lessons In Relationship Dyads, is scheduled for publication with Red Hen Press in the U.S. His short story A Theory of Discontinuous Existence was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, while another short story, The Sand Flea, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His poem Blind Alley was shortlisted for the Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem in 2007. His short fiction and poetry has been published in numerous journals in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, including several anthologies such as Event's Peace & War, Telling Differences: New English Fiction from Quebec, Tesseracts 2: Canadian Science Fiction, The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing, New Wave of Speculative Fiction Book 1, and The Best of Foliate Oak. Along with partner Connie Guzzo McParland, Michael runs Guernica Editions, a Canadian literary publishing house.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780981514819 |
| ISBN 10 | 0981514812 |
| Title | Berlin |
| Author | Michael Mirolla |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Leapfrog Press |
| Year published | 2009-01-01 |
| Number of pages | 232 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |