Tougher Than Sugar
by Lawrence Crewcraft
In Tougher than Sugar, Lawrence Crewcraft takes his reader on a fascinating journey into the depths of an infinitely surprising bowl of oatmeal he ostensibly finds before him one indistinct post-millennial morning. As his spoon dives ever deeper into the layers of grain and milk, so are we transported into a dizzying portrayal of a universe perpetually at hand but forever beyond our cognizance. From the first spoonful to the apocalyptic final swallow, Crewcraft delivers language unparalleled amongst contemporary writers, complemented with an intensity of humour that transcends what one would expect from the subject matter. One of the year�s most original and mind-bending works, Tougher than Sugar but as Sweet as Nails will be put a smile on the face of even the most obstinate postmodern reader.
Lawrence Crewcraft, a former policy consultant, is writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba.
"Lawrence Crewcraft�s Tougher than Sugar is a post-modernist coo and a simply delicious story that entices the reader and has them asking for a second helping." (Lisa Moore)
�Crewcraft is the most exciting metafictional writer of the last decade � and I�ll dance on David Foster Wallace�s coffee table in my cowboy boots and sing that.�
( Fanny Balboa, Meathook Magazine)
�Tougher than Sugar is a marvellous, startling original piece of writing. Instead of redundantly flogging the well-flayed horse that is contemporary
postmodernist literature, Crewcraft breaths new life into the hapless beast.� (The Onion)
�The premise, a two hundred page novella about eating a bowl of oatmeal, may sound as inviting to some readers as being gouged in the eye, but Crewcraft delivers one of the year�s most pleasant surprises, producing a book of rare and unorthodox humour.� (The Windsor Wailer)
Excerpt from Tougher Than Sugar
"The oats below, steaming, their loins bursting, now echoed the oscillations of breath coming from above, from that world where psychology is marred by hardware and the end-all of Almighty�s has its throne. Off in some impossible distance wafts a heavy greased aroma of eggs and pork sausage. In the concave reflection of a stainless steel utensil, where strands of daylight cling to the edge of their spectrum, misty longings of self-conscious gazing suggest a happening is taking place. As at a carnival of mirrors where infinite regressings are commonplay yet never intelligible, an awareness of collapsing space-time trajectories, wanton vector states idly seeking their own primordial womb, filled with a sacrificial tortoise � slow roasted by a scowling hare � and dancing with the heat energy of the oats approaching from below."
0-90210-81-0
$14.95 (Can), $11.95 (US)
Fiction, (softcover) 150mm x 180mm
343 pp