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Looking Good and Having a Good Time

Fawn Parker
SHORT STORIES

64 pages
First edition, second printing
Cover art: Louise Reimer
ISBN 9780993946455
Fall 2015

We stayed in a house by the water with one bedroom and a view of the beach. The floor of our bedroom tilted inward. It tilted further inward every day, I could have sworn. No matter how many times we got up in the night to push our beds apart, they would be touching by morning. God forbid I dropped my hairbrush and it rolled so deep into the floor-crevice that it may as well have been lost at sea.

Cohabitation with John Travolta; a never-ending Canadian Shield; the ghost of Steve Jobs wailing from a cracked iPhone 3; the stories in Parker’s Looking Good and Having a Good Time are sharp, delightful, surprising, and, most importantly, never boring. Parker’s characters engage awkwardly with the world around them, while her vivid imagination and sense of humor allow them to reach dizzying heights.

Praise

“These four stories etch out the topography of modern estrangement with a diamond-cutter’s tools. Wry, surprising, and seemingly effortless, Parker’s prose offers a glimpse into an uncanny world where the familiar slow-dances with the absurd and comes away with sweaty—and indelible—handprints on its jeans. An assured and remarkable debut.”
Anna Leventhal, author of Sweet Affliction

Press

Broken Pencil – “Parker’s writing is characterized by a very dry brand of humour that takes you by surprise. Looking Good and Having a Good Time is an energetic read.”

Inside the Frozen Mammoth (Podcast)

Montreal Review of Books – “Parker makes fun of her generation, and of contemporary literature. Magical realism has arrived in millennial Montreal.”

 

 

Excerpts

Cosmonauts Avenue Looking Good and Having a Good Time

Queen Mob’s Tea House Vacation With My Mother

Fawk Parker

Fawn Parker is the author of What We Both Know (McClelland & Stewart, 2022), Set-Point (ARP Books, 2019) and Dumb-Show (ARP Books, 2021). Her short story, “Feed Machine,” was long-listed for the 2020 McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She is co-founder of  BAD NUDES Magazine, BAD BOOKS Press, and president of The Parker Agency. A recent Master’s graduate from the University of Toronto, she is the recipient of the Adam Penn Gilders Award for Fiction (2019) and Concordia University’s Irving Layton Award for Fiction (2017). Short fiction and poetry can be found via EVENT Magazine, Joyland, The Puritan, carte blanche, Vallum, and elsewhere. Looking Good and Having a Good Time was her first published book.