Christopher McPherson
Description
Review This collection of 17 stories by a Canadian writer - who is also a carpenter - details complications of failure and loss. The characters care a
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bout their televisions, cars, guns, drugs and computers, but possessions only add to the desperate minimalism of the stories' subject matter. The book suffers from a consistent, aggressive bleakness of characters' lives. My favorite story, "Maudie," begins with zoo workers disposing of a beloved, dead hippo, and one sympathizes with Ellen, the protagonist, at her day's end when she says, "Mom was sitting in the living room when I got home, watching Donahue and cleaning her gun." The story is marred, however, by McPherson's tendency to provide too many disgusting details - here, about gore and vomit - and by a failure to tell more about Ellen. What is not minimalist is McPherson's style, which is probably responsible for the fact that most of the stories have appeared in respected Canadian literary magazines. Some stories use imaginative organization and are packed with poetic phrasing. A few are entertainingly meta-fictional. In "Falling," a character compares time to "a soup, chunky" -a description that captures some of McPherson's originality in the handling of time and in the use of repetition. -- From Independent Publisher Product Description "Everything But the Truth" is a stunning debut of short fiction by Christopher McPherson, a carpenter by trade, who constructs, with disarming detail, stories of desire and loss, and the thin line between truth and fiction in people's lives. These are confessionals by characters whose emotional lives are laid bare, from a lovelorn hippo-keeper at the zoo, to an ill mother who has an affair with her vegetable garden. Versatile in style and theme, these narratives are driven by humour, grief, and the search for reason in a complicated world. About the Author Boston-born in 1952, Christopher McPherson grew up in small-town Connecticut where he was kicked out of "a Dead Poet's Society prep school" for being a "political agitator." He escaped the draft by moving to Canada, and found himself on a hippie commune. The ideas for these stories have grown out of his experience: home schooling his children, traveling Europe, for two years, with his partner and their two children, then aged nine and fourteen, running the hostel in Malta when the Egyptian commandos stormed the hijacked airline in 1985. Now living in Victoria, McPherson's stories reveal everything. . . but the truth.
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