Winner of the Writers' Trust of Canada Journey Prize
Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year
Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize
A search and rescue volunteer looks for a missing snowboarder on Christmas Eve. Two brothers retreat to the woods to shoot a film in memory of their dead friend. A reclusive forestry worker picks up a hitchhiker on his way down Mount Seymour. A young man finds a temporary haven on the ice barge where he works. In this collection of award-winning stories, Tyler Keevil uses the rugged landscape of Vancouver's Burrard Inlet - where the city meets the mountains and civilization meets the wild - as a backdrop for characters struggling against the elements, each other and themselves. Written in a lean, muscular style, these are stories awash in blood and brine, and steeped in images of freedom and confinement.
Tyler Keevil was born in Edmonton, grew up in Vancouver, and in his mid-twenties moved to Wales. He is the author of three novels - Fireball, The Drive and No Good Brother - and his short fiction has appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies in Britain, Canada and the United States. He has received a number of awards for his writing, including the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize, the Wales Book of the Year People's Prize and the Writers' Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize (for "Sealskin," in this collection). Among other things, he has worked as a tree planter, ice barge deckhand and shipyard labourer; he is now a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University.
Praise for Sealskin:
"I was blown away. Beautiful writing ... stunning." Miraim Toews (author of All My Puny Sorrows)
"Vividly told in muscular prose, Keevil's stories are compelling evocations of isolation and strength in an often unforgiving landscape." Carys Bray (author of A Song For Issy Bradley)
"Beneath the deceptively calm surface of these spare and beautiful stories, mad passions boil. There is a transatlantic tradition of studying the interaction between men and nature, in such figures as Hemingway, Carver, McGuane; now Keevil extends and enriches that lineage. He truly is that good." Niall Griffiths (author of Grits & Kelly & Victor)
"'Sealskin' is a stunner: straightforward and unadorned, but humming with subsurface power. Possessed of a sturdy narrative backbone and unrelenting forward momentum, the story explores familiar themes - alienation, humanity's relationship to nature, coming of age, and loss of innocence - but does so in a way that seems fresh and vibrant. Strong physical details adjoin keen psychological insights, and Keevil handily builds scenes that reverberate with insight and potency. Keevil has accomplished something rare: a story about rough masculinity that brims with emotion and pathos." The Writers Trust of Canada Journey Prize judges 2014 (Craig Davidson, Saleema Nawaz, and Steven W. Beattie)
"Tyler Keevil's 'Carving Through Woods on a Snowy Evening' tells of a snowboarder, missing on a mountainside not long after an accident, being tracked by hopeful rescuers. 'Carving' has ... storytelling rich in symbolism; subtle plot devices; and an ending that opens and sings." --New Welsh Review
"Keevil's writing has been compared to Raymond Carver's and I can understand the comparison, although the voice is most definitely his own. As with Carver, Keevil's stories are like ink on wet blotting paper there's a dense dark core of story arc, spare but telling detail and dialogue, yet around that dense mass is an aureola of implied back narrative and a sense of a continuum past the final full stop." - CCQ Magazine
Genre: Literary Fiction
Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year
Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize
A search and rescue volunteer looks for a missing snowboarder on Christmas Eve. Two brothers retreat to the woods to shoot a film in memory of their dead friend. A reclusive forestry worker picks up a hitchhiker on his way down Mount Seymour. A young man finds a temporary haven on the ice barge where he works. In this collection of award-winning stories, Tyler Keevil uses the rugged landscape of Vancouver's Burrard Inlet - where the city meets the mountains and civilization meets the wild - as a backdrop for characters struggling against the elements, each other and themselves. Written in a lean, muscular style, these are stories awash in blood and brine, and steeped in images of freedom and confinement.
Tyler Keevil was born in Edmonton, grew up in Vancouver, and in his mid-twenties moved to Wales. He is the author of three novels - Fireball, The Drive and No Good Brother - and his short fiction has appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies in Britain, Canada and the United States. He has received a number of awards for his writing, including the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize, the Wales Book of the Year People's Prize and the Writers' Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize (for "Sealskin," in this collection). Among other things, he has worked as a tree planter, ice barge deckhand and shipyard labourer; he is now a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University.
Praise for Sealskin:
"I was blown away. Beautiful writing ... stunning." Miraim Toews (author of All My Puny Sorrows)
"Vividly told in muscular prose, Keevil's stories are compelling evocations of isolation and strength in an often unforgiving landscape." Carys Bray (author of A Song For Issy Bradley)
"Beneath the deceptively calm surface of these spare and beautiful stories, mad passions boil. There is a transatlantic tradition of studying the interaction between men and nature, in such figures as Hemingway, Carver, McGuane; now Keevil extends and enriches that lineage. He truly is that good." Niall Griffiths (author of Grits & Kelly & Victor)
"'Sealskin' is a stunner: straightforward and unadorned, but humming with subsurface power. Possessed of a sturdy narrative backbone and unrelenting forward momentum, the story explores familiar themes - alienation, humanity's relationship to nature, coming of age, and loss of innocence - but does so in a way that seems fresh and vibrant. Strong physical details adjoin keen psychological insights, and Keevil handily builds scenes that reverberate with insight and potency. Keevil has accomplished something rare: a story about rough masculinity that brims with emotion and pathos." The Writers Trust of Canada Journey Prize judges 2014 (Craig Davidson, Saleema Nawaz, and Steven W. Beattie)
"Tyler Keevil's 'Carving Through Woods on a Snowy Evening' tells of a snowboarder, missing on a mountainside not long after an accident, being tracked by hopeful rescuers. 'Carving' has ... storytelling rich in symbolism; subtle plot devices; and an ending that opens and sings." --New Welsh Review
"Keevil's writing has been compared to Raymond Carver's and I can understand the comparison, although the voice is most definitely his own. As with Carver, Keevil's stories are like ink on wet blotting paper there's a dense dark core of story arc, spare but telling detail and dialogue, yet around that dense mass is an aureola of implied back narrative and a sense of a continuum past the final full stop." - CCQ Magazine
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Tyler Keevil's Sealskin