Silent Cruise, Timothy Taylor's first collection of short fiction, is a long, lush series of stories that will delight fans of his enormously successful debut novel, Stanley Park. Several of these strangely original stories are obliquely connected with each other (either through strange thematic turns or common characters), and they share with the novel a western Canada setting and an interest in food.

Taylor begins with "Doves of Townsend," a piece about an antique buyer whose fetishization of beautiful made things is challenged by a calculated brush with the real world--in the form of a collection of butterflies found scattered across a table at a flea market. The author then moves into even more eclectic territory: in "The Resurrection Plant" an ostracized Jewish high school student in Edmonton shares a locker with a teenage tough who insists on displaying a Nazi flag; while in "The Boar's Head Easter" a Vancouver cook travels to Chicago to meet his mother's mysterious old flame, nursing a half-spoken passion for his best friend's girlfriend all the while. The novella that concludes the collection, "NewStart 2.0TM," traces two artists from rural Saskatchewan through their truly bizarre lives to a confrontation in Rome, raising old questions about artistic production in a strange and unusual fashion. A couple of the pieces (most notably the title story) feel like filler, but by and large they are deft, melancholic, and utterly wonderful. --Jack Illingworth, Amazon.ca


From Booklist
This collection of stories by the author of the novel Stanley Park [BKL Mr 15 02] includes "Doves of Townsend," winner of the Journey Prize, the Canadian counterpart of the O. Henry Prize, for best short story of 2000. "Doves" presents Clare, who inherited the collectibles business that grew out of her father's passion for rare knives. Mourning his suicide, she rediscovers, through a family friend's kindness, the world's beauty in the microcosm of a Postman butterfly. As lovely in its own way is "Smoke's Fortune," about the shooting of a rabid Doberman amid the odd splendor of carefully organized car radiators, fenders, and hubcaps in a junkyard. "The Resurrection Plant" in that story is a brown husk that looks dead. In "A dried dog turd," a science student hoots as the class tries everything to prove it dead or kill it. Yet to a schoolboy browbeaten by a Nazi sympathizer, it symbolizes the rebirth of hope and justice after the Holocaust. Taylor's graceful touch and keen eye leave one eager for his next book. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
?The stories collected in Silent Cruise crackle with intellectual energy and symbols and feature an impressive range of characters in up-to-the-moment settings.? -- Quill & Quire, Best Books of 2002, February 2003

?Timothy Taylor exploded onto the literary scene in Canada last year with his novel, Stanley Park, but his real strengths lie in short fiction. Silent Cruise, a collection of eight previously published short stories and one new novella, demonstrates Taylor?s diversity of subject and ease with language?. If you?ve already read all eight stories in the various literary journals, then you may think it?s not worth buying the collection. Wrong. The book is worth it simply for the novella, ?Newstart 2.0 ???. Silent Cruise is a chunky collection, packed with dense and complicated stories. Flaws are minimal, and they are the result of trying something big. The rarified narrative level that Taylor inhabits is a delight to explore in this collection.? -- Monday Magazine, May 2002

?An intriguing collection of short fiction [from] a master stylist?. Taylor?s use of language is exact. He has a gift for choosing exactly the right word to express an idea or an emotion, giving his writing a feeling of strength and precision. Each character rings true, enabling the reader to become engrossed in the stories. Silent Cruise is excellent writing and enjoyably hypnotic.? -- Hamilton Spectator, May 2002

?There can be little doubt that Taylor is one of Canada?s best short-story writers?. Taylor rises to the challenge Northrop Frye set for the poet: he shows us the world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.? -- Quill & Quire, March 2002

?Seeking solace, people turn to self-help gurus and superficial notions of God. Some of us, though, have discovered something akin to hope and meaning via art and intellect?. Silent Cruise. It?s a good thing for those of us who appreciate well-crafted, perfectly pitched, intellectually mature, quietly poetic, and frequently funny stories that Timothy Taylor ? came to his sense and quit his day job to write?. Taylor writes with the wonder and joy of a kid who has had his nose pressed to the candy-store window and all of a sudden finds himself inside, with one cautious eye glancing back over his shoulder.? -- The Georgia Straight, May 2002

?Intelligen[t] and rich?. A work of baroque elegance and inventiveness ? Timothy Taylor [is] a writer to seek and savour.? -- Annabel Lyon, National Post

" ... few demonstrate the density, intellectual range and originality that Timothy Taylor does in Silent Cruise.... sharply honed brilliance.... Overarching questions of consumption and pleasure, loss and hunger, marble these stories with intricate flavour.... Demanding and complex, the passions unveiled in these explorations are inescapable. Timothy Taylor is the only writer ever to have three stories published in The Journey Prize Anthology in one year. It is easy to understand why. This is a dazzling collection.? -- Aritha van Herk, The Ottawa Citizen, May 2002

?? Timothy Taylor is a gifted writer who successfully catches the neurotic (and creative) zeitgeist of our times?. both amusing and thought provoking?. In Silent Cruise, Taylor treads the subtle border territory separating outright parody from the strange truths and beauty of our time¯this is a fine collection, and Timothy Taylor is a major talent who continues to make his mark on the Canadaina literary scene.? -- Times Colonist, May 2002

?An eclectic collection?.? The Edmonton Journal, June 2002


Book Description
Prize-winning short fiction from the best-selling young writer that "everyone in the Canadian literary community today is talking about." --Globe and Mail. "The purpose of butterflies will not be found in the few flowers they may inadvertently pollinate. Nor in the number of parasitic wasps they may support...Their purpose is their beauty and the beauty they bring into the lives of those of us who have paused long enough from the cares of the world to listen to their fascinating story." In Timothy Taylor's "Doves of Townsend," these words, found in the pages of a field guide to butterflies, throw a lifeline to a young woman struggling to stay emotionally afloat in the wake her father's suicide. They help her to explain to herself her father's obsession with beautiful things. They also help her to understand the true value of her father's legacy--the family's antiques business, and her own inborn helplessness before the beautiful and the real. "Doves of Townsend" was chosen the best short story of the year 2000 by the judges of the Journey Prize, the Canadian counterpart to the U.S. O. Henry Prize Story. It and the eight other pieces collected here, many of them already anthologized in Best Canadian Short Stories and other annuals, bring us a new voice in short fiction --brilliant, stylish, humorous, and humane. In each of Taylor's tales, certain mysterious things of this world--an antique watch, a mountain of radiators, a racing-form, a constellation--reveal their beauty to those who have eyes to see. To read Silent Cruise is to see this poignant beauty for oneself, and, like Taylor's characters, to have one's life irresistibly changed by it.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Before he dazzled American readers with his best-selling novel Stanley Park, Timothy Taylor was already acclaimed in Canada as one of the finest writers of stories working today. Silent Cruise brings us this new voice in short fiction - a voice by turns compassionate and cutting, plainspoken and subtle, but always pitch-perfect." Here are nine variations on Taylor's abiding themes of art, work, desire and loss. In the title story, a mathematical prodigy, his mind an engine for crunching probabilities, applies his genius to the logic of the racing form and discovers the workings of chance. In "Pope's Own," a Vancouver cheese importer risks her all on a pearl of great price - a dairy farm in County Cork whose exquisite cheese has been tasted only rarely beyond the walls of the Vatican. And in "Doves of Townsend" - a story chosen by Canadian critics as the best of the year 2000 - a young antiques dealer grieving her father's suicide finds solace in a most unlikely place: a field guide to butterflies.

FROM THE CRITICS

Sandra Martin - Globe and Mail

This year's Journey Prize Anthology could have been retitled The Timothy Taylor Anthology since [he] contributed three of the twelve stories in the collection. [The] anthology editors...who read the stories blind...read eighty-one submissions from Canadian literary journals and then gave Taylor the $10,000 nod for the best.

John Bemrose - Globe and Mail

After Alice Munro, [Best Canadian Stories'] most impressive contributor is Timothy Taylor...There is something unique and utterly convincing about Taylor's fiction: it's muscular without being overbearing, witty without going for easy laughs. Such qualities make [him] the undisputed star of another annual collection, Coming Attractions...Taylor doesn't belong in a collection called Coming Attractions. He's already here.

Publishers Weekly

Award-winning Canadian author Taylor (Stanley Park) turns his attention to short fiction; the result is an absorbing novella and an uneven series of short stories. "NewStart 2.0" is a fascinating look at creativity and fraud in the art world that begins when painter Shane Donald meets idiosyncratic fellow student Dennis Kopak while studying at an art college. Donald goes on to become the editor of an art magazine and his quest to interview a reclusive Italian painter leads him on a labyrinthine path back to Kopak, who has become the painter's agent after a long interlude in which he developed a unique software product. While this piece deftly probes the tenuous nature of artistic success, many of the short stories don't fare as well. Taylor is an elegant craftsman, but he doesn't always link his well-drawn characters with the objects and endeavors that fascinate them: the title story is a compelling account of a dark horse that breaks the back of a gambling operation, but "Doves of Townsend" is a murky effort in which an antiques dealer focuses on a butterfly collection to keep herself together after her father's suicide. "Smoke's Fortune," meanwhile, is a brutish, gut-wrenching affair about the struggle of two men to kill a dangerous dog, while "Prayers to Buxtehude" is a graceful yarn about a man who loses his fiancee after confessing how an unrequited passion for his childhood piano teacher ended in disaster. Taylor has his share of ups and downs here, but his polished prose makes for a generally rewarding read. (Nov.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews