torontonian authors > canadian authors

across the street from my work is one of those little temporary stores that sells books no one wants to read and 4 for $20 dvds that no one wants to watch. occasionally i'll wander over on my lunch and see what's interesting. mostly i laugh at the newly packaged, straight to dvd "films" that star celebrities when they were nobodies. you know those? (don't buy them - they're always terrible... unless you love michelle pfieffer. she's in, like, a hundred of them.)

last week, a book caught my eye. the withdrawal method by pasha malla. i bought it (five bucks) and, honestly, i read the whole goddamn thing straight through. this is the best collection of unrelated (but eerily similar) short stories i have ever read. some of the prose was so fucking poignant that i actually read it aloud to my coworkers. grab this book if you see it somewhere or download it. (can you get books illegally, too?)

when one of the characters, a struggling writer, forces himself to try and find the metaphor within the situation, to make the natural beauty mean something else, something he can use... i wanted to scream. it was just too perfect.