Press
praise for And Also Sharks
“Fraught with a slightly skewed view of reality, the prose is at times so dry you’d give anything for the characters to stop talking and exit with whatever grace they might have left. But at these points you laugh, and the tension breaks and starts all over again.”
—Brooke Ford, The Globe & Mail (Read the full review here)
“Westhead is adept at providing caustically funny snapshots of lives that are twisted by loss, loneliness or boredom.”
—Steven W. Beattie, National Post (Read the full review here)
“With her penchant for supremely neurotic protagonists and thematic complexity, and her rich sense of the absurd, Westhead may have a claim to being CanLit’s Woody Allen.”
—Shawn Syms, Quill & Quire (Read the full review here)
“The narrative tone of voice is deftly comic…but the settings and situations are emphatic about the gnawing difference between one’s high expectations for life and what actually comes to be.”
—Brett Josef Grubisic, Vancouver Sun
“…unsettling, endearing, funny, sad, surprising and all else. In short, it’s stunning short fiction.”
—Mike Landry, Telegraph-Journal
Pickle Me This is a fan of And Also Sharks. (Read Kerry Clare’s review here)
And Also Sharks is in the Globe & Mail’s Top 100 Books of 2011!
And Also Sharks made it onto Kobo’s Top eBooks of 2011 (page 2)!
And Also Sharks was included in these three east-coast “Best Books of 2011″ lists: The Coast, Telegraph-Journal, and Salty Ink.
And Also Sharks was very kindly reviewed in Necessary Fiction by a writer in Austin, Texas!
Books in 140 Seconds speedily and sweetly reviews And Also Sharks.
CBC Books included And Also Sharks on their list of 10 Canadian women writers you need to read now.
interviews, features, and other delightful items
Shawn Syms mentions the title story in And Also Sharks in his great piece on social media in short fiction for The Toronto Review of Books.
How cool is this?? This lovely exchange with an And Also Sharks reader not only proved to me that this is a very tiny world indeed, but also made my, well, year.
My Questionless Books Interview for Open Book: Toronto
WordPlay, a project presented by WordFest and Six Degrees, is a radio play produced from my short story “Community” in And Also Sharks. Read about the project and download the radio play here. Many thanks to WordFest and Six Degrees’ wonderful director, Christian Goutsis, and his incredible cast of voice actors. The sound effects are pretty cool too.
Fellow Cormorant author Barbara Lambert kindly included me in her fun project Dr. Johnson’s Corner, where she asked writers to contribute unused or abandoned bits of their fiction.
Radio interview for “Click here” with Mitchell Caplan on Ottawa’s CHUO-FM89 (June 2011). Thanks to Greg Kampf and Derek Wuenschirs for recording and posting magic!
“The Curious Head of Jessica Westhead” (feature by Ashleigh Gaul in the summer 2011 issue of Broken Pencil)
“Oddballs, Misfits, And Also Sharks“ (interview with Carly Maga in Torontoist)
Q&A with The Danforth Review
Priscila Uppal discusses And Also Sharks on CBC Radio Canada International’s Biblio-File.
On Day 20 of his 31 Days of Stories 2011, Steven W. Beattie features “Coconut” from And Also Sharks on That Shakespearean Rag.
Ten Questions interview on Open Book Toronto, and Nathaniel G. Moore profiles me and Julie Booker in this Open Book article.
The Globe & Mail asked a bunch of writers if Canada was a good place to write and work, and I said yes (I’m #30).
And Also Sharks is on Ali Smith’s bedside table!
Teri Vlassopoulos, author of the debut short story collection Bats or Swallows, did a fun “uninterview” with me on her blog.
In the first installment of “Fiction Craft”, a new monthly column on Open Book Ontario, Shaun Smith asked several authors (including me!) how they go about naming their characters.
And Also Sharks gets a very kind mention by Sean Dixon in The National Post Afterword’s Spring Picks.
“Who’s the YOSS?” Matthew J. Trafford and I gab about short story joy on the Joyland blog.
Broadsheet Magazine interviewed me on their blog about YOSS (scroll down to “YEAR OF PLENTY”).
The folks at Broadsheet Magazine also ran a contest called 60 Great Canadian Authors in 30 Seconds, and I was honoured to be one of their colourful author heads!
selected reviews of Pulpy & Midge
“Westhead finds weirdness in the everyday, exploring such universal indignities as forgetting the receptionist’s name or having to stake claim to coffee mugs from the communal kitchen. Despite this familiarity, the book takes on a slightly surreal tone through highly mannered dialogue. The novel’s chief challenge lies in making a passive character compelling, and in that it largely succeeds, through subtle clues that Pulpy and his wife are much more aware than outsiders give them credit for.”
—Quill & Quire
“Pubs under office towers are filled with stories of the Boss from Hell. Some workers chortle over their beer. Others cry into it. In her debut novel, Jessica Westhead brings the monster boss home for dinner.”
—The Globe & Mail
“Pulpy Lembeck, whose moniker is the result of a long-standing college joke related to his prodigious orange juice consumption, is the unassertive protagonist of Torontonian Jessica Westhead’s comedic debut novel, Pulpy & Midge… The strength of Pulpy & Midge is dialogue, of which there is a great deal.”
—The Toronto Star
“In Pulpy & Midge, you end up genuinely liking the title characters, not just as characters, but as people. And the more I liked Pulpy, the more I liked his author. Westhead has a real gift for dialogue, creating a vibrant world that exists almost completely between quotation marks… Westhead is an expert at creating tension, whether it is between or within characters. Because almost everyone in Pulpy & Midge is polite, the tension inhabits the spaces between the lines, cold as ice.”
—Broken Pencil (fiction review of the issue)
“Deftly written from start to finish, Westhead’s comic tale is narrated in an almost deadpan style she manages to retain, even as the tension in Pulpy’s life expands to the breaking point. Not so over-the-top as Dilbert, Pulpy & Midge nevertheless skewers today’s corporate office scene with equal relish.”
—The Record
“Don’t let the cartoonish title fool you—the book’s most obvious comparison is the TV series The Office; Pulpy & Midge has the same wry pacing. With charming design and a storyteller’s skill, Westhead keeps her fiction fresh by letting the audience follow the characters through ordinary workdays as Pulpy waits for his imminent promotion.”
—Eye Weekly
Good dialogue is a rare thing and Westhead is having fun with her talent. You can almost see her tapping out the quirky banter with a half grin. At times, the dialogue is so fast and fun you miss your bus stop while reading about Pulpy missing his (oh irony)… The sharp dialogue allows Pulpy & Midge to be casually comedic one moment and dead serious the next.
—The Southernmost Review
Ian Daffern includes Pulpy & Midge in a round-up of CanLit office fiction for DailyXY.com!
other reviews
Open Book Toronto reviews a reading
Broken Pencil reviews poetry winner II
Jessica’s Poetry Winner II is hilarious. Her zine takes us on a witty adventure through the web site of the International Library of Poetry. Jessica looks up her name and finds the poem she had submitted represented. “Ode to Sparky” has found posterity on their database. Meanwhile, she writes another ode (this one a bit more risque) which seemingly disappears off the web site. She phones a customer representative for the site and taunts them (even though she states that the rep “seemed like a very nice person, with an impeccable sense of humour”) concerning the whereabouts of her newly fashioned poem. With her commitment to vanity and self-indulgence, Jessica provides a look at the aftermath of being a “poetry winner” and its ramifications, neatly sending up both the poets who send in their work, and the for-profit poetry publisher the International Library of Poetry.
selected interviews
on BookTV:
12 or 20 questions by rob mclennan
