Stanley Park Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Stanley Park Book

In Timothy Taylor's debut novel Stanley Park, aspiring food artiste Jeremy Papier attempts to juggle the finances of his fledgling eatery, The Monkey's Paw, and his conflicted feelings about his attractive sous-chef. Meanwhile, on the other side of downtown Vancouver, his anthropologist father camps out in Stanley Park to study a group of homeless men. Impending financial ruin drives Jeremy into the clutches of an evil coffee magnate while his father delves deeper into the indigent lifestyle, probing the mystery of two dead children once found in the park as well as his failed marriage to Jeremy's mother. A tragicomic denouement takes the characters back to their human roots as hunter-gatherers in the 21st century. The big idea in Stanley Park is that global corporate culture threatens the local connections that sustain us. Only the outcasts in Stanley Park retain these connections, and one of them imparts to Jeremy the secret of trapping a swan: "'Stinky box does it,' Caruzo informed, scratching himself. 'Stinky box is all.'" He retrieves a discarded hot dog shipping box and explains the technique: "'I distract him.' Caruzo said. 'You kill him. Distract. Kill.'" Though our hero cannot bring himself to dispatch the bird, he understands the basic link with nature. Stanley Park isn't Crime and Punishment and doesn't pretend to be, even if the vocabulary is sometimes a little pretentious. Taylor, who won Canada's 2000 Journey Prize for his short fiction, tells a good story, creating plausible characters for this coming-of-age narrative and making a good start to a novelistic career. --Robyn Gillam, Amazon.ca Read More

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  • Product Description

    A love story wrapped in a murder mystery, served up as a laugh-out-loud satire of the trendy urban restaurant scene.

    Jeremy Papier, the new Alice Waters of the Vancouver food world, is fast becoming known for his radically rear-guard cuisine--tradition-steeped dishes that celebrate the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. His restaurant, The Monkey's Paw Bistro, is always fully booked, but, unfortunately, it's more an artistic triumph than a reasonably run business. Far too costly ever to turn a profit, it is kited by Jeremy on dozens of maxed-out credit cards. An old family friend, Dante Beale, owner of a worldwide chain of cookie-cutter coffeehouses, is willing to bail the restaurant out-- for the price of sole control. It's a business proposition made in hell, one strenuously opposed by Jeremy's pretty young sous chef, the incorruptible, plainspoken Jules.

    Jeremy's problems deepen when his eccentric-academic father--a "participatory anthropologist" half Joseph Mitchell, half Joe Gould--loses himself among the homeless in Vancouver's Stanley Park. He lives as they do (he's especially adept at catching and roasting sparrows) and soon involves Jeremy in researching a "cold case" crime, the true-life murder of two children slain in the park in the early 1970's.

    Timothy Taylor--the writer who "everyone in the Canadian literary community today is talking about" (Globe and Mail)--weaves together the disparate, brightly colored strands of his story with unerring skill and unflagging comic invention. Stanley Park, already a Canadian best seller, is a comic novel of the first order--and a memorable literary debut.

  • 1582432074
  • 9781582432076
  • Timothy L. Taylor
  • 25 April 2002
  • Counterpoint Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 432
  • 1
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