Press
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 and 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
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
