Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee

Ground Works celebrates the innovators behind the unruly iconoclasm at work in Canada's best fiction. Sometime between the 1960s and 1980s Canadian society began unbuttoning itself, and our experimental writers helped loosen the threads. This anthology exhibits the first deep breaths. From Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers to John Riddell's Pope Leo El Elope (a tale that recounts a papal assassination, using only the letters E, L, O, and P) to the most radical écriture féminine of Audrey Thomas and Gail Scott, Ground Works displays Canadian writing as it's never been seen before. The idea for the anthology was Margaret Atwood's. She introduces Ground Works, and joins forces with avant-garde poet Christian Bök to collect the very best experimental fiction written in English between 1965 and 1985.