Barry Pomeroy

Follow to get new release updates and improved recommendations

About Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology. You can find him at http://barrypomeroy.com/

John Thornton

Are you an author?

Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography.

Learn more at Author Central

1 11 1

$9.99

Paperback
$2.99

Kindle Edition
$12.55

Paperback
$11.55

Paperback
$10.99

Paperback
$4.99

Kindle Edition
$10.99

Paperback
$2.99

Kindle Edition
$10.95

Paperback
$11.90

Paperback
$12.59

Paperback
$11.90

Paperback

Author Updates

Books By Barry Pomeroy

All Formats Kindle Edition Paperback

Not Quite Dark: A Post-Apocalyptic Adoption Story Nov 5, 2015

by Barry Pomeroy

( 4 )

$2.99

After his daughter coughed herself to death and his wife left for the city, Frank hid in their house. Even while riots captured the downtown, smoke rose from the neighbourhood, and his water was cut off, he refused to leave. With only a pool in his basement and a huge bag of rice to survive, he is coming apart as rapidly as his society.
When he goes down an alley to kill a dying cat and finds a child, Kaela’s need rescues him from the flames that reach out from the increasingly dangerous city. To distract her from the chaos, Frank tells her about an orderly main street, a library and school, stores, and other impossible remnants of their disintegrating society. Although his description sounds more like a myth than reality, on the road they meet others like themselves, dreamers searching for peace and security. Unfortunately, there are also those who repay kindness with malice, and generosity with greed, and Frank and Kaela’s bond is tested in a world without police and the rule of law.
Join Frank and Kaela as they negotiate their deteriorating world. With only their dreams of a better life to guide them, and their love to hold them together, they look for a place worthy of a child who has been burned before.

Other Formats: Paperback

Historiographic Metafiction: Lying with the Truth Nov 19, 2014

by Barry Pomeroy

( 2 )

$4.99

In this project I ground my reading of historiographic metafiction in a series of postmodern texts which work out of and subvert traditional notions of historical writing. I use Linda Hutcheon’s construction of this postmodern genre to investigate the particular literary and historical strategies these texts use and abuse in order to write an alternative history. Beginning by reviewing the theory surrounding historical fiction as well as historiography, I investigate the specific textual strategies that historiographic genres—such as the postmodern novel, the Canadian long poem, the short story and to some extent, the film genre—use to present their self-reflexive interaction between history and fiction.

Other Formats: Paperback

A Mad Trapper’s Examination of Reader Response and Reception Theory Nov 21, 2014

by Barry Pomeroy

$2.99

I ground my reading of reader-oriented criticism in a particular text, Rudy Wiebe’s The Mad Trapper. Positioning this novel as representative of the contradictory characteristics of all texts--”always already” open to multiple interpretations--I use these multiple readings both to examine and undermine The Mad Trapper and Reader Response/Reception theory. Situating and problematizing my own discourse by examining its pedagogically-questionable origin, I begin my reading of both Reader Response and The Mad Trapper with a Phenomenological investigation into intentionality and the construction of the reader’s consciousness. I then move to a reading of Reception theory which, by examining The Mad Trapper’s textual conditions of production and dissemination to the reading public, works to undermine Phenomenology’s problematic stance. Since both of these theoretical readings are premised upon notions of a unified and coherent self, I further explore their implications by discussing at first general theories of subjectivity and The Mad Trapper, and then finally making a reading of both Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and The Mad Trapper. I intend that this multiple reading of both theory and text, by utilizing interpretation’s inherent yet often unacknowledged multiplicity, undermines the dominant objective and authoritative interpretation of traditional critical practice.

Other Formats: Paperback

South America by RV : Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina Jan 1, 2019

by Barry Pomeroy

$3.99

My latest trip to South America was meant to be much more than just a return to the continent. Silvio had readied his RV for the three-country excursion, and more importantly, planned particularly enticing meetings with alligators and presidents.
After arriving in Buenos Aires we almost immediately crossed to Uruguay where we spent an hour with José “Pepe” Mujica and enjoyed the beach. Then we drove north into Brazil where Silvio had promised tropical swamps and alligators. After hundreds of kilometres crossing rich farmland and marveling at the country’s infrastructure, we came to the pantanal region. The vast swamps of the pantanal were rich with life, and although the tourist trade had slowed to a trickle, we spent our time watching for the sudden animal through the trees and listening for the prehistoric calls of birds.
Between an abortive attempt to cross the Bolivian border and an equally effective attempt at Paraguay, we photographed butterflies and coatis in the world famous Iguazú Falls area, talked to locals and learned about police corruption and cross-border smuggling. Back in northern Argentina we went against the advice of nearly everyone, and set out to explore the poverty-stricken and forgotten provinces of Formosa and Chaco before we turned south to Cordova and Sante Fe. There we spent long days in the mountains before seeing the cousins on our way back to Buenos Aires.
Travelling by motorhome meant that we were more versatile than most tourists. We could pull over at remote vistas and extend a conversation that otherwise a set schedule might cut short. We didn’t require anything other than the truck’s shower and bathroom, water tanks and refrigerator, and cooking stove and furnace. This is not so much a story about the hardships of traveling as it is a report from the hidden corners of countries that are only accessible when you travel by RV.

Other Formats: Paperback

The Cook Islands and Fiji: A Thirty Years’ Retrospective of Living in Manihiki Dec 2, 2019

by Barry Pomeroy

$4.99

Thirty years have passed since I went to the Cook Islands and Fiji, and although the original record of my voyage has long been lost, when I sifted through my memories of that most seminal time in my life, the entire trip was still there waiting for me. My first time overseas, teaching, and living with a family, I found that what I’d been taught about people from other countries was vague and largely untrue. Instead, the tapestry of the Islanders’ way of life was much more complex, subtle, and even when I left I discovered aspects of their culture that surprised me.
I lived in the Cook Islands for four months, landing in Rarotonga where I found a placement in the northern Cooks, and then teaching high school on Manihiki. I travelled to the north by ship, by way of Aitutaki, Palmerston and Suwarrow, and visited the neighbouring island of Rakahanga while I lived in the northern Cooks. Traditional Maori culture still peeked out from under its colonial blanketing, and everywhere I went I was made to feel welcome. When my placement was done I flew to Fiji where I met other travellers, learned something of Fijian history and culture, and dreamed of floating a bamboo raft down the Sigatoka River.

H.G. Wells’ World Brain: Annotated with an Introduction by Barry Pomeroy, PhD (Scholarly Editions Book 1) Dec 9, 2017

by Barry Pomeroy

$3.99

This annotated edition of World Brain is meant to stimulate scholars to return to this giant intellect, a writer who, with only microfiche to inspire his understanding of the possibilities of communications technology, imagined a connected and coordinated world sharing a huge knowledge base.
Wells was inspired by the needs of a world teetering on the brink of global war, and eagerly met with Stalin and Roosevelt to learn what they knew of the peace process. When he found them without advisors, he turned to the education system only to be dismayed by its derivative and dismal state.
Finally, Wells decided that the ordinary citizen would have to teach themselves, and he turned his considerable mind to the task of how that might be effected. He imagined a globally financed encyclopedia, which would be continually updated by teams of volunteers and would serve the intellectual needs of the modern citizen.
In these days of internet technology, H. G. Wells’ warnings and imaginings are more relevant than ever, as in these fever days of incipient nanotechnology, ghostly quantum effects, and international media system threats of global conflict, we are increasingly drowning in a sea of information we scarcely understand. Wells’ synthesis of information delivery systems, and the competent receiver and producer he imagines at its centre, has much to offer the modern scholar who is trying to make the cornucopia of the internet relevant to our changing world.

Terminal Earth Dec 1, 2010

by Neil Coghlan , Robert Long , Barry Pomeroy , Jamie McNabb , Simon Hood , John Atkinson , Mark Romasko , Desmond Warzel , Neil Thomas , Michael Stewart

( 10 )

$5.99

What will you be doing when the shadows fall and the clocks stop?

Some of the most talented new voices in short fiction from around the world offer their takes on the end of the planet as we know it.

Man-made, geological, biblical, extraterrestrial - the nature of the end of days is imagined in many ways but they all have one thing in common.

Humanity.

From lovers watching firestorms in exotic island locales to strangers playing a last game of baseball in abandoned America; through the eyes of sentient robot hunters or businessman suicide bombers; in the strongholds of alien-built bases and across the body-strewn beaches of Asia; looking down from spacecraft and peering up from bunkers, the only certainty is that our Earth is terminal and we will look for a way to continue, somehow, somewhere.

Other Formats: Paperback

Life on the Water: Logbooks and Journals Jan 22, 2015

by Barry Pomeroy

$2.99

Life on the Water is meant to collect the accounts I’ve kept of living in the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific, in 1991, and the voyages I made with the Whimsey, a wooden sailboat I built in 2003 so I could sail around the Strait of Georgia. I kept an account of tide and points of sail, as well as what it was like to sail when I knew so little about living in that way. I sailed off Vancouver for three summers and these logbooks find a place here. Likewise, in the summer of 2004, I decided I would canoe down the St John River in New Brunswick and keep a record of what it was like on the river and who I met along the trip. Come learn along with me as I discovered, by times slowly and always with delight, what a life on the water entailed.

Other Formats: Paperback

The Last Leaf on the Tree: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the last years (Tom Waits' Music to Stories Book 4) Apr 30, 2019

by Barry Pomeroy

$4.59

This fourth and last volume of my Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs tells more stories of Waits’ later period beginning with the blues, ballad, and experimental bastards of his musical career from Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. Released in 2006, Orphans was compiled of songs that extended as far back as Rain Dogs and contained many which had not been previously released. I end the book series with Waits’ latest album, Bad as Me, also from Anti-Records in 2011. Bad as Me continues digging in the rich vein Waits had been following since the eighties. Like a miner working a seam, he is tirelessly following the mineral to its source, and has dug deep into the earth itself, releasing the primal holler and backwoods stomp alongside the operatic subtlety of jazz and blues rhythms.
Like the first three volumes of Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs, I use the lyrics and music to tell the story waiting in the wings to come on, the one that the songs either avoid or never intended to let loose. These most recent releases tell the poignant story of the war’s effect on the warrior, the aging musician up against the constant rejuvenation of his craft, and the twinges in the muscles which is the love that sprawls through the stories in the later albums. The love story which keeps the protagonist alive and breathing and sparkling through the darker elements of a world gone mad with money and weapons.
Until Waits releases another album, however, this is the last volume of my series. That being said, like thousands of other Waits fans, I eagerly await the next entrance into a world we would never have experienced without his unique talent.

Other Formats: Paperback

A Junkman's Choir: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the later years (Tom Waits' Music to Stories Book 3) Jan 27, 2019

by Barry Pomeroy

$4.59

This third volume of my Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs series is an attempt to tell the story of his later period beginning with the dark tapestry of tales and stripped-down guttural roar of blues rock in Bone Machine. Released in 1992, in many ways that album was the hollering inbred cousin who didn’t find enough room on Rain Dogs. Within a year The Black Rider tells its listeners—in case we have forgotten from earlier albums—that “There’s a lot of things in this world / you’re going to have no use for.” The anodyne to this is not the roustabout drinking of his earlier period, however, for “when you get blue / And you’ve lost all your dreams / There’s nothin’ like a campfire / And a can of beans.” The campfire and the can of beans do not cure the world’s ills; there is just nothing like them.
Like the first two volumes of Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs, I use the lyrics and music to tell the story waiting in the wings to come on, the one that the songs either avoid or never intended to let loose. I use the nightmare calliope of Mule Variations from 1999 and Alice and Blood Money from 2002 to evoke Waits’ carnival barkers, inept profiteers, and balladeers to reach outside the wreckage of the personal to peer into the blackened well of those characters’ lives. Raising their tangled stories like belladonna in the garden, I hope that the nightmare rides through albums like Real Gone’s 2004 seemingly antithetical stories somehow combine with the narrative I am trying to pull out from Waits’ exploration of Middle America, with its losses, its joys, and the cars everyone was driving when we went over the cliff.

Wasted and Wounded: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the early years (Tom Waits' Music to Stories Book 1) Mar 12, 2018

by Barry Pomeroy

( 1 )

$4.59

This collection unearths the stories that run parallel to those of Tom Waits’ early songs. They do not retell as much as push the envelope wider, strain the meaning of a few lines, and stretch the place the song occupies so that the river rats and abandoned dogs, crying children on the street and shifty-eyed suits, salesmen with their patter and hobos with their rags, can shoulder out a space. Searching for the American dream and distracted by a promise, a woman tosses pennies into liquor bottles in a half moon bar, a fast car leaves the parking lot with the radio on full, even while a knife fight wounds the street and an old man pumps quarters into a one-armed bandit.
The songs tell the story of a man who carries the Midwest on him like a ring he can’t get off, who rattles on the wide streets of the American west like a tin can tied to a junkyard dog and crowds in the eastern cities where the brownstones spill out onto the broad steps of long afternoons. Refusing to be caught by the despair of the endless nights, he jockeys for dollars with the sell-outs, fishes for the glisten of silver among the litter in the alleys, and sleeps under the bridge on a rainy night.

Other Formats: Paperback

How to Write an English Paper: Argue, Research, Format, and Edit Mar 17, 2017

by Barry Pomeroy

( 2 )

$3.39

This guide is meant to assist those who want to learn the basics of writing English essays, as well as how to use research to support their academic arguments. Accordingly, it explains the general purpose of the academic English paper, the rationale for its structure and how to incorporate quotes and separate arguments, as well as offers research tips. Many guides on the market are full of information the student does not necessarily need, and tend to be expensive books whose rationale for existence is hundreds of pages devoted to primers on sentence structure, conjugation of verbs, and arcane use of punctuation. This project is meant to answer the need for a quick, coherent guide that focuses more on argument than grammar, and more on research and literary terminology than parts of speech.
With the notion of research changing as quickly in the academic world as it is in the mind of the general public, this guide takes on the task of explaining the different resources available as well as their relative strengths, and how to incorporate material into the essay using both MLA and APA format.
Lastly, the guide gives an editing checklist the reader can use to double-check their own work, offers a description of how their paper might be graded, and takes on the task of explaining constructions as prosaic as punctuation and as arcane as fake transitions and the incorporation of quotes. I also have a list of literary terms commonly used in undergraduate English papers, and offer a few fun exercises to tease your brain, test your knowledge, and boost your self-esteem.

Other Formats: Paperback

←Previous Page
1
2
3

...

More Information

Are you an author? Visit Author Central to change your photo, edit your biography, and more

See Author Pages Frequently Asked Questions

Anything else? Provide feedback about this page

Similar authors to follow

About Barry Pomeroy

Customers Also Bought Items By

Are you an author?

Author Updates

More Information