With section titles like 'e-mails to the coast', 'Accelerator', 'Decelerator', and 'Postscript: Three Teachers', the narrator of The Syllabus -- M -- digresses, fantasizes, catalogues and invents, slowly recovering the strands of childhood exploration and adolescent obsession, joy and morbidity, that have led him to both alienation and freedom. First friend, first love, first sex, inklings of vocation: all of the elements of the Bildungsroman are here, but put in a high-speed blender that tracks the hallucinatory smears they leave on the mind. Using a collage-like technique that mixes times and genres -- flashing forward and backward in a narrative that is, by turns, confessional, meditative, lyrical and comic -- The Syllabus traces the crooked path by which one student makes his way through, and beyond, the proscribed syllabus. About the Author: Mike Barnes is the author of Calm Jazz Sea, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Aquarium, winner of the 1999 Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of stories by a Canadian, and The Syllabus, a novel. His stories have appeared twice in Best Canadian Stories, three times in The Journey Prize Anthology, and won the Silver Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards. He was the subject of a feature issue of The New Quarterly (Summer 2001) which included an interview and three new stories. Formerly a piano teacher, fishing guide, janitor, steelworker, dishwasher, clock salesman, security guard, English teacher, in recent years he has been working as a private tutor. He lives in Toronto.
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