National Post asks Mayr and Dixon for their spring fiction picks

In the National Post's books section on Saturday, March 12, they asked the authors of some of this spring's most anticipated books (including Monoceros's Suzette Mayr and The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn's Sean Dixon) to tell them the books they arere most looking forward to reading this Spring.

Here were Suzette Mayr's and Sean Dixon's responses:

'There are two books I'm really looking forward to because they're both by superb writers who haven’t published in a relatively long time. I absolutely cannot wait to read Zsuzsi Gartner's short story collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. The stories in her first book, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, made me simultaneously laugh and cringe — she is a master of satire. Her writing is incredibly rude, incredibly funny. Rosemary Nixon's new novel Kalila also sounds like it's going to be amazing. It's about a young couple's attempts to cope with their terminally ill baby. Nixon is dealing with sensitive, painful material here, but based on her first two books of fiction, I know this book is going to be rich, thoughtful and poetic.' — Suzette Mayr is the author of the forthcoming novel Monoceros

'The book I'm most looking forward to this spring is Jessica Westhead's story collection And Also Sharks, a great title for her style of play, which can explore the brutal obstacles the world throws up in the way of nice, reasonable people. Like a patient photographer, she catches polite, anxious urbanites in hot, mumbled flashes of passion before they have a chance to notice, blush and recede into the weeds. In her vision of city life, closing a door can be a breathtakingly heroic act, because, after all, that man out there might not be a shark at all, he might be a very nice person, despite all the evidence, and if you're wrong and you've done something so bold and rude as to close the door on him, you might embarrass yourself, and that could really suck for you.' — Sean Dixon is the author of the forthcoming novel The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn

See the entire article with all the authors' responses at www.nationalpost.com.