Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac [Paperback]

Hal Niedzviecki (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 1994

Charlotte the spider... Wilbur the pig... Fern and Avery... and Lurvy, the hired hand. They and all the other characters from the timeless children's classic that you remember so well are back, in author and small-press overlord Hal Niedzviecki's first novel, Lurvy: a farmer's almanac. A caveat: given the (ahem) rather significant changes in social morays since the first appearance of these jolly folk, happenings on the Arable farm are somewhat different than you might well remember them.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Hal Niedziecki is co-editor and founder of Broken Pencil magazine, the guide to independant culture in Canada. He is also co-organizer of Canzine, a festival of alternative culture held annually in Toronto, and a correspndent for CBC's Brave New Waves. Hal also frequenty writes for the Globe and Mail and is the author of several books including We want some too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture (Penguin Books, 2000), Hello, I'm Special: The New Conformity (Penguin Books, 2004) and the forthcoming book, The Program (Random House, 2005).

Product Details

• Paperback: 165 pages
• Publisher: Coach House Books; 1st edition (January 18, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1552450805
• ISBN-13: 978-1552450802
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,777,274 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, culture commentator and editor whose work challenges preconceptions and confronts readers with the offenses of everyday life. He is the author of many books including the short story collection Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened and the nonfiction book The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. He is the current fiction editor and the founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts (www.brokenpencil.com). Hal's writing has appeared in newspapers, periodicals and journals across the world including the New York Times Magazine, Playboy, The Utne Reader, The Globe and Mail, the National Post, Toronto Life, Walrus, Geist, and This Magazine. Niedzviecki is committed to exploring the human condition through provocative fiction and non-fiction that charts the media saturated terrain of ever shifting multiple identities at the heart of our fragmenting age. He lives in Toronto.

Hal's web page: www.smellit.ca
Hal's Peep Culture blog: http://thepeepdiaries.com
Follow Hal on Twitter: http://twitter.com/halpen
Like Hal on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/HalNiedzvieckiwriter

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Experimental novel that actually succeeds pretty well, March 1, 2005

By 

Jonathan Teller-Elsberg (Thetford VT (USA)) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac (Paperback)

Up front disclaimer: I am a good personal friend of the author. Anyway, I'll write this on the assumption that you'll trust what I say is honest regardless.

Lurvy is Hal's best novel, and not only is it relatively good compared to his others, it's good on any standard scale. It's a rewriting of E.B. White's marvelous Charlotte's Web, but just about as different as can be. The style is very experimental: quirky, visceral prose that's often more train of thought than plot oriented; giving way on occasion to passages that are in cartoon format; and other maneuvers. Probably that sounds like an unlikely mixture to succeed, but it did (for me, at least, and much as I like Hal as a friend and a writer, not all his writing does). The book successfully creates a dark and emotionally forbidding atmosphere and puts a mildly hallucinogenic lining on the clouds.

Do you like to pooh-pooh the "mainstream"? Would you go see a punk band that you'd never heard before? Well, don't chicken out now. This novel is right up your alley -- plus it's from a cool little indy publisher in Toronto.