Experience

Publications

• Cruise Missile Liberals

  Nightwood Editions

• Cruise Missile Liberals

  Nightwood Editions

• Cosmo

  Coach House Books

  If reading most short story collections is like canoeing gently down a tranquil and picturesque river, then reading Spencer Gordon’s Cosmo is like jet skiing over Niagara Falls while Leonard Cohen whispers in your ear. You’ll join Matthew McConaughey as he drives naked across the desert in a surreal dark night of the soul. You’ll meet a young wrestling fan half-nelsoned by circumstances and a sister’s best intentions. You’ll hear a Miley Cyrus admirer defend his passion in a 3,000-word sentence. And you’ll watch an aging porn star don a grotesque dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of his life. Through ten incendiary and mercurial stories, Cosmo will take you on a rollicking ride over the churning waters of pop culture and the malaise of our solitary existence. ‘Demonstrates a refreshing willingness to test the plasticity of language and structure ... The 10 stories in Cosmo are an investigation into the nature of authenticity in an age that seems ever more mediated and synthetic. How is it possible to live a meaningful life in the world that lionizes surfaces and shallowness? Gordon provides no comfortable, simplistic answers, but his approach to asking the questions is startling and invigorating.’ – Steven W. Beattie, Quill and Quire, Starred Review ‘Not only a collection of fiction but also a work of cultural criticism ... It succeeds not only as a well-wrought and keenly written collection of narratives, but also as a work of analysis ... Cosmo is a rare book in that it is brave enough to explore the ways in which being loved in private has a very real counterpoint in public, in the form of fame, public identity and cultural cache. In doing so, Gordon dissects the very idea of the authentic in an increasingly public world in which the self is ever more constructed.’ – Natalie Zina Walschots, National Post