Oh! Twenty-Seven Stories

In OH!, his first short story collection in five years, Leon Rooke brings together an extraordinary array of documents from diverse hot spots around the world. The news. Late developments from the front: Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Italy. Two years ago, when Rooke was touring Italy in promotion of his collection Narcico allo speccio (edited by Branko Gorjup), the Italian poet and publisher Marco Fazzinni invited him to write several stories devoted to art. An abbreviated version (Arte), with cover and etchings by the celebrated artist Arnaldo Pomadoro, appeared earlier this year in a bilingual edition published in Italy. OH! gathers the whole of the astonishing stories to which Fazzinni’s suggestion gave birth—Italian “art”, Mexican “art”, Gypsy “art”, Native “art”, political “art”, etcetera—most appearing in print here for the first time. Rooke has published nearly 300 stories in a wide variety of North American magazines, in addition to several prize-winning novels.

LEON ROOKE is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, editor and critic. He has published 28 books, and nearly 300 short stories He was born in rural North Carolina in 1934, lived in British Columbia (Canada) for a good many years, then moved east to Eden Mills in 1987, where he became the founder and artistic director of the popular Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. He has taught or served as writer-in-residence at over a dozen Canadian and U.S. universities, and conducted workshops both in Canada and abroad. His work has been widely translated, most recently in Croatian, Italian, Japanese, and French. His critical work has been published extensively in Canada and the U.S., including the Washington Post Book World and the New York Times Book Review. A 440 page book of Essays on Rooke – White Gloves of the Doorman, featuring 27 writers and critics from six countries; includes a 1 hour film/DVD on Rooke – was published by Exile Editions in 2004.