Overview

Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of “The Afterword,” Steven Heighton’s memos and dispatches to himself — a writer’s pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing — have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that’s as much about creative process as it is about created product, at once about living life and the writing life. “I stick to a form that bluntly admits its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both things,” Heighton writes in his foreword, “a form that lodges no claim to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times, this form (I’m going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the debater’s initial be-it-resolved. At other times it’s a meditation in the Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that aspires to address other selves — readers — as well.” It’s in these very aspirations, reaching both back into and forward in time — and, ultimately, outside of the pages of the book itself — that Heighton offers perhaps the freshest, most provocative picture of what it means to create the literature of the modern world.

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9781550229370

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Reviews

Heighton goes on to offer helpful hints on editing, criticism, overwriting, trends in pop culture, reading, poetry, grief as muse, clerical hyper-efficiency and some fun with Al Purdy's shirt. His book is a delight. --StarPhoenix

Every Lost Country is thrillingly plotted, elegantly detailed, and alive with characters who will seem as real to you as people you've known for years and can still talk to for hours on the phone. Heighton sets them down in what is literally the world's most breathtaking landscape, at the very limits of human physiology, where the compass of moral courage points them into uncharted territory. Read this novel to be transported and enthralled. -- Jamie Zeppa, author of Beyond the Sky and the Earth on Every Lost Country

From the opening pages, you won't be able to put down Steven Heighton's Every Lost Country . A dizzying read, it's one of those rare finds where gorgeously drawn characters and a galloping plot merge effortlessly. Heighton proves himself once again a young lion of Canadian literature. -- Joseph Boyden, author of Through Black Spruce

Author Information

Steven Heighton's most recent books are the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010). He is also the author of the novel Afterlands, which appeared in six countries, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and was a “best of year” selection in ten publications in Canada, the USA, and the UK. The book has recently been optioned for film. He has also published The Shadow Boxer—a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year for 2002—which appeared in five countries. He lives with his family in Kingston, Ontario.

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