Wigrum Front Cover


ISBN: 9780889227781
Pages: 200 pp
Pub. Date: October 15 2013
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.5625"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Fiction / ANT000000

  • FICTION / Literary
  • ANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES / General

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Wigrum
By Daniel Canty
Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei

It’s October 1944. During a brief respite from the aerial bombardment of London, Sebastian Wigrum absconds from his small flat and disappears into the fog for a walk in the Unreal City. This is our first and only encounter with the enigmatic man we come to discover decades later through more than one hundred everyday objects he has left behind. Wigrum’s bequest is a meticulously catalogued collection of the profoundly ordinary: a camera, some loose teeth, candies and keys, soap, bits of string, hazelnuts, and a handkerchief. Moving through the inventory artifact to artifact, story to story, we become immersed in a dreamlike narrative bricolage determined as much by the objects’ museological presentation as by the tender and idiosyncratic mania of Wigrum’s impulse to collect them.
With its traces of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec, Daniel Canty’s graphically arresting Wigrum explores the limits of the postmodern novel. Having absorbed the logic of lists and the principles of classification systems, the Wigrumian narrative teeters on the boundary between fact and fiction, on the uncertain edge of the real and the unreal.
Readers venturing into Sebastian Wigrum’s cabinet of curiosities must abide only the following maxim: If I can believe all the stories I am told, so can you.

Runner-up 2014 Alcuin Award for Book Design in Canada

Winner 2012 Grafika Grand Prize Winner (Typography)

Daniel Canty is a Montreal-based writer and film director who works in literature, film, and new media. Canty was a member of the pioneering multimedia studio DNA Media, in Vancouver, and directed the inaugural issues of _Horizon Zer_o, the Banff New Media Institute’s web space on the digital arts in Canada.
Canty’s first book, Êtres Artificiels (Liber, 1997), is a history of automata in American literature. From 2002 to 2005, he co-directed the poetry magazine C’est Selon. He has contributed to three award-winning collaborative books: Cité selon (2006), on the city; La Table des Matières (2007), on eating; and Le Livre de Chevet (2009), on sleeping.
Canty directed Antipodes, a short film on painter Rafael Sottolichio, as well as two experimental shorts, Méduse and Hôtel de la Mer. In fall 2013, he will shoot the short film Cinéma des Aveugles (Cinema for the Blind).


Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei

Oana Avasilichioaei interweaves poetry, translation, photography, sound, and performance to explore an expanded idea of language (whether textual, visual, aural, etc.) as reverberatory and evolutionary, polylingual and polyphonic poetics, historical structures, borders and movement. Her six poetry collections include We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012, A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015).

Read more about Oana Avasilichioaei