The Porcupine's Quill
Celebrating thirty-five years on the Main Street
of Erin Village, Wellington County
Aquarium by Mike Barnes
‘Mike Barnes brings to Aquarium a deceptively relaxed precision and a grown-up acceptance of puzzlement as a natural state of mind.’
Movement is the key to this collection. The settings for the stories in Aquarium range from metropolis to hamlet, from a Florida retirement community to a northern Ontario reserve on the brink of freeze-up. The people in Aquarium are as varied as its locales; the characters are landlords, actors, drinkers, painters, teachers, doctors, steelworkers, fishermen, students, shopkeepers, weathermen, clerks and security guards. Couples are a recurrent theme: the dreams and devices by which lovers join or drift apart.
2000—Danuta Gleed Award,
Winner
Review quote
‘... fiercely alive, marked by a sharp, unerring eye for detail and a wonderful way with metaphors.’
—Toronto Star, Best of ’99
Review quote
‘Barnes chooses his narrative turns with delicacy, avoiding high drama and epiphanies in favour of keen, incremental observation of his characters.’
—Globe & Mail
Mike Barnes is the author of the novels Catalogue Raisonné and The Syllabus, the short fiction collections Aquarium — winner of the 1999 Danuta Gleed Award — and Contrary Angel, and two poetry collections, Calm Jazz Sea, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial award, and a thaw foretold. His stories have appeared twice in Best Canadian Stories, three times in The Journey Prize Anthology, and won the Silver Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards. He was the subject of a feature issue of The New Quarterly (Summer 2001) which included an interview and three new stories. In 2008 he released his first non-fiction title, The Lily Pond: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis. Formerly a piano teacher, fishing guide, janitor, steelworker, dishwasher, clock salesman, security guard, English teacher, in recent years he has been working as a private tutor. He lives in Toronto.
The Porcupine’s Quill is remarkable in Canadian publishing in that most of the physical production of our journal is completed in-house at the shop on the Main Street of Erin Village. We print on a twenty-five inch Heidelberg KORD, typically onto acid-free Zephyr Antique laid. The sheets are then folded, and sewn into signatures on a 1907 model Smyth National Book Sewing machine.
To take a virtual tour of the pressroom, visit us at YouTube for a discussion of offset printing in general, and the operation of a Heidelberg KORD in particular. Other videos include Four Colour Printing, Smyth Sewing and Wood Engraving. Photographs of production machinery used on these pages were taken by Sandra Traversy on site at the printing office of the Porcupine's Quill, December 2008.
The Porcupine's Quill would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) is also gratefully acknowledged.
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FICTION / Short Stories
FICTION / Literary
ISBN-10: 0889842094
EAN-13: 9780889842090
Publication Date: 1999-10-15
Dimensions: 8.75 in x 5.56 in
Pages: 152
Price: $15.95