| Welcome
to Canada is a collection
of novellas that dramatize what happens when a character
meets his or her opposite.
This
might mean a love story, the beginning of friendship
or much worse. It could constitute a meeting with someone
who brings out the main character's shadow self.
The
characters meet in a Canada that is far from the comforts
of home or city or familiar neighbourhood, a place where
people feel on edge.
Carpenter's
characters spring quickly to life in all their troublesome
complexity. They can be funny or menacing or Big Trouble
or endearingly human.
You
never know.
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Welcome
to Canada has just won the IPPY (Independent Publishers
of North America) gold medal for Canada-West –
Best Regional Fiction.
This
collection also won a second award, bestowed by the
American judges in New York, May 26, 2010, for the Short
Story category.
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| "David
Carpenter is a rigorously masculine writer, in the tradition
of ... storytellers like Ernest Hemingway and Thomas
McGuane. His subjects--hard drinking, pugilism--are
reminiscent of Hemingway, and his linguistic facility
recalls McGuane. But Carpenter's fictional voice, and
the territory it covers, is unique to him. As Warren
Carious writers, "He is preternaturally attuned
to the poetry of the vernacular and the extraordinary
variety of Canadian English, and he is able to place
each of his characters in their own particular spots
on that lavish linguistic spectrum, so that every phrase
they speak contains a compendium of information about
where they come from, what they want out of life, and
their successes and failures.'"
Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag: Notes from
a Literary Lad
full
review
"Just
a year after the publication of his entertaining novel
Niceman Cometh, Saskatoon's David Carpenter
brings together eight of his stories in Welcome
to Canada....[His last story] "The Shot"
reflects on a family photograph taken by a diffident
young photographer back in the 1920s. The descendent
telling the story offers a clever observation near the
end: "A good memoir is worth a thousand photographs;
it struggles to release the captives in the picture
frame." And then a nice post-modernist touch: the
narrator, whose name is Dave, says, in the second-last
paragraph of the book, "Sometimes when I walk past
the old house on a summer night I can almost hear my
grandfather telling stories of terrible blizzards, problem
bears, deer hunts and monster pike." Which of course
can be seen as an allusion to most of the topics covered
in the stories that precede this one in Carpenter's
appealing and immensely readable book."
-Dave Williamson, Prairie Fire Review of Books
full
review
The
latest book by Saskatoon author David Carpenter is a
collection of novellas and short stories that succeeds
on a number of levels. Welcome to Canada features a
landscape that is richly imagined (or perhaps remembered);
it is a place where people and nature play an equal
role, with the weight of importance shifting smoothly
back and forth between them. The author has created
realistic voices for his characters, and renders their
dialogue authentically and with great skill. He writes
colloquially, which can be distracting if not done well.
Suffice it to say, he does it well.... Regardless of
where you live or grew up, Carpenter has crafted his
stories in such a way that the land and people feel
familiar. Even urban dwellers will be able to appreciate
the wildness and rough edges of the characters and the
countryside.
-Carmen Klassen, The Star-Phoenix, January
9, 2010
"Carpenter's
stories are beautifully honed acts of generosity. Reading
each one is like happening upon an unexpected gift.
We return from Carpenter country with a new appreciation
for the people and creatures of our own everyday countries,
especially the ones we have all too often forgotten."
-Warren
Cariou, "You Are Now Entering Carpenter Country,"
from the introduction to Welcome to Canada
by David Carpenter
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