We So Seldom Look on Love: A Collection of Stories (Flamingo originals) (Paperback)

'Gowdy is a writer now emerging as one of Canada's most accomplished and outrageous ... We So Seldom Look on Love will only deepen her reputation for fine technique and alarming content. These are unsettling and profoundly moving short stories to be read, and reread, and then to be dreamt upon . . . this is a remarkable and uplifting book.' Toronto Globe and Mail 'Barbara Gowdy's stunning collection plants her firmly in the constellation of Canada's bright literary lights . . . in this new set of stories she truly shines. Her insatiable curiousity, her candour and her cool wit emerge like chrysalids from the assembled deformity of this lively and memorable book.' Montreal Gazette

A debut collection from Canadian novelist Gowdy (Through the Green Valley, 1988) limns - with dark humor and wry compassion - the lives of those on the margins of normality. The stories here all share a common theme, echoed in the title - which comes from a poem, "Necrophilia," by Frank O'Hara, that suggests "it is better that someone loves them": "them" being the dead, the physically and psychologically impaired. The title piece, narrated by a female necrophiliac and hearse driver who's been obsessed with the dead since childhood, makes her obsession no less palatable but, in the context, understandable: "I have found no replacement for the torrid serenity of a cadaver, absorbing their energy, blazing it back out. Since that energy came from the act of life alchemizing into death, there's a possibility it was alchemical itself." In "Body and Soul" - about Aunt Bea, a religious, elderly widow who provides a loving home for a brain-damaged little girl, abandoned by her mother - Gowdy accomplishes the rare feat of making goodness a compelling reality that is neither mawkish nor dull. In "Sylvie," a young woman born with a set of extra nips and limbs is taken from the freak show where she works by a wealthy young doctor who's fallen in love with her - but she fears that after the surgery he suggests, she'll "become somebody else." Other tales detail the anguish of a "Two-headed Man"; the reactions of a woman who finds she's married a transsexual ("Flesh of My Flesh"); and the experience of a young mother who's lost her child in a grotesque accident ("Lizards"). Gowdy skillfully walks a fine line between sensationalism and sentimentality to give life and love to the feared and forgotten. An impressive accomplishment. (Kirkus Reviews)

A debut collection of short stories by the author of the novel "Falling Angels". Populated by an assortment of freaks, Siamese twins, voyeurs, exhibitionists, necrophiles and transsexuals, this collection of extraordinary, bizarre and often grotesque stories is shot through with humorous sympathy.