I am as imperfect, as particular, as anything else, the Millpond seemed to be saying, and if I am not, then I aspire to be. If I have been a disappointment to you, then remember that all along Time has been erasing my promise. And anyway, hasn’t Arcadia Centre been pinned to me unashamed, like a glorious boutonniere? Stanley Jardine understood that I could be the thing itself, can’t you?
Sure, Millpond, sure. Just remember it took Time, and the thing about Time, he works with a scythe.
Hey, same to you, sister!
Fifteen minutes later Rachel was heading back to the city on the 303. It was not being free of the Millpond that made her feel this way: half drunk. It was the Millpond reminding her that Harry really had made the return trip to the dump where the phantoms go, and that right now there genuinely was nothingelse to do but sing I Climbed the Rocky Mountains (But I Can’t Get Over You) into the rearview for Clare Elizabeth, who slumped in her car seat and drooled on her hand and saw light and colours and heard the wind and the engine and her mother’s song and smelled and felt the warmth of her mother’s love and had no thought, no thought at all, of Harry.
About the Author
GREG HOLLINGSHEAD won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for his story collection The Roaring Girt. His novel The Heater won the Rosers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. His most recent novel, Bed’am, was a Globe :00 Best Book of the Year and was shortlisted for many prizes. Including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Caribbean and Canada Region), as well as longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Greg Holllngshead Is Director of Writing Programs at the Banff Centre. He lives with his family in Edmonton.
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Praise for Spin Dry
“An energetically imaginative, precisely focused satire, with a delightful sense of comic timing.”
—Books in Canada
“Hollingshead’s light touch disguises an almost cruelly uncompromising honesty…. Watch yourself question everything you think is real.”
—Edmonton Journal
“Brilliant and funny. Every line sparkles with originality and intelligence. Spin Dry is inspired, hilarious and macabre.”
—Barbara Gowdy
“Spin Dry is a wacky, wonderful, rowdy, comic novel…. A wonderfully inventive, gentle satire, delivered in a fresh and vivid voice.”
—Sandra Birdsell
“This is a voice that deserves hearing, and Spin Dry is full of razor-sharp observations that draw blood.”
—The Fiddlehead
“Spin Dry is wry and wild, the literary equivalent of shotgun art…. Funny, mean, impressive prose.”
—The Calgary Herald
Copyright
Spin Dry
© 1992 by Greg Hollingshead.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40102-9
A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Acknowledgments:
I am grateful to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for financial assistance during the writing of this work. Parts of this work have appeared in different form in the Malahat Review and the Camrose Review.—G.H.
First published by Mosaic Press: 1992 This trade paperback edition: 2006
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hollingshead, Greg
Spin dry : a novel / Greg Hollingshead.
First published: Oakville, Ont.:
Mosaic Press, 1992.
“A Phyllis Bruce book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-00-639375-7
ISBN-10: 0-00-639375-6
I. Title.
PS8565.O624S6 2006 C813’.54 C2005-906470-6
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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