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    ISBN: 9780889227781 | Paperback

    200 pages | Pub. Date: 20131015
    9 W × 6 H × 1 D inches
    Backlist | Fiction | Bisac: FIC019000
    Rights: WORLD

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)

By Daniel Canty

Daniel Canty is a Montreal-based writer and film director who works in literature, film, theatre and design, and new media. Canty collaborated with the pioneering multimedia studio DNA Media, in Vancouver, and directed the inaugural issues of Horizon Zero, the Banff New Media Institute’s web space on the digital arts in Canada.

Read more about Daniel Canty


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


news | 2015-05-13
Listen to poems from Limbinal by Oana Avasilichioaei this Friday in Toronto

…having translated, among other things, Wigrum by Daniel Canty, which Talon published in 2013. …


news | 2014-05-07
We Believe in Wigrum

Wigrum has been reviewed in the May 2014 issue of The …


news | 2014-04-21
Wigrum Wins Third Place in 2014 Alcuin Awards for Design!

…and Studio Feed in Montreal! The designers of Wigrum (2013), a charming book of fiction by Daniel … in eight categories. The font designed for Wigrum , which bears the same name, also recently won … Grafika award for excellence in design in Quebec. Wigrum was typset in Wigrum and Minion by Raphaël … Solís. See the full list of Alcuin winners here. Wigrum is available from Talonbooks for $14.95. …


news | 2014-02-17
Wigrum Wins!

…The font called Wigrum, which was designed by Raphaël Daudelin and Anouk … Pennel of Studio FEED for the novel Wigrum , has been named one of the 12 best graphic … in graphic design in Quebec. In the words of Wigrum author Daniel Canty, “woo-hoo (with a W)!” See …


news | 2014-01-03
New Year, New Logo

…responsible for the charming illustrations in Wigrum by Daniel Canty (translated by Oana …


news | 2013-12-18
Wigrum Found in the Glasgow Review of Books & Geist Magazine

…That elusive Wigrum (Daniel Canty, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei) … the experience of reading Daniel Canty’s Wigrum will be strikingly familiar. To see a few of the …


news | 2013-11-18
TONIGHT: Talonbooks Fall Launch in Toronto! Wigrum, Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour, and Singed Wings

…will read from their inventory/novel, Wigrum – a typographically delightful book with lovely …


news | 2013-10-25
Launched! Daniel Canty's Wigrum in Brooklyn, NY

…Daniel Canty launched his new inventory novel Wigrum at Mellow Pages Library in New York City. Canty … and Wigrum‘s translator Oana Avasilichioaei read in … published a thorough review of the event and of Wigrum itself. Below are a few brief excerpts: Jacob, … trading off, they read alternating sections from Wigrum. I’ve been dipping in to the book all week in … at one time by the elusive figure, Sebastian Wigrum. The printed book itself is beautifully presented …


news | 2013-10-14
A Collaborative Affair: Wigrum Launch in Montreal

…Oana Avasilichioaei launched their new novel Wigrum to a packed house of about 50 people at the Drawn … arts and culture blog, wrote last week, “ Wigrum is a surrealist inventory with the dreamy traces … touching reading, the collaborative team behind Wigrum, including Canty, Ayasilichioaei, illustrator … writing to translation to illustration to design, Wigrum is a contained body of work conscious of its own …


news | 2013-10-04
Celebrating Translators, the Too-Often Unsung Heroes of World Literature

…The recent launch of Wigrum , written by Daniel Canty and translated by Oana …