Permanent Tourists (Signature Editions)
REVIEWS
The Ormsby Review - October 23, 2021
The final page of Permanent Tourists closes with an “ocean of ghosts,” an image simultaneously elusive and evocative. This exploration of emotion without the assumption of clear resolution underlines the entirety of Genni Gunn’s third short story collection to a fascinating effect. Continue Reading . . .
“In eight intersecting stories that range from a suicide pact on the tourist beaches of Mexico to Angkor Wat, a stone museum in Italy, and the Thai fleshpots that conceal a lost father, Genni Gunn charts the blank spaces in human relationships: silences between loved ones, dark histories neither escaped nor forgotten, moral dilemmas that spin on a dime, death that brings no redemption. Delicately rendered, with characters that move restlessly from one landscape to the next, these complex stories look without flinching into the heart of human longing.”
— Merilyn Simonds, author of Refuge
“Permanent Tourists shows yet again that Genni Gunn is a master of the short story genre. Her sentences are a marvel: elegant, supple, dense yet transparent, and lit by intelligence, wit, and compassion. Her prose plunges the reader into settings from Cambodia to Las Vegas. Loss and grief have turned the characters into tourists in both foreign lands and life. They travel, searching for connection and revelation; they encounter disappointment, or worse, sudden danger. Gunn gifts us the pleasure and insights of the journey.” — Caterina Edwards, author of The Sicilian Wife
VIDEO
Virtual Launch with host Hal Wake
Short Story discussion with three BC Writers
Hungers (Raincoast Books)
REVIEWS
“Gunn's wonderfully quirky and rigorous imagination, her unquenchable curiosity, her poet-passion for the plasticity of language, her knack for twinning grit and intelligence, are alive and kicking in Hungers..."- The Globe & Mail, November 2002
“Few contemporary writers can match Gunn in irony and searing characterization.”- The Star, September 2002
"Gunn unfolds the story carefully, exposing the characters' mutual betrayals with the well-paced control of a strip-tease."
- Quill & Quire, September 2002
"Gunn's no-nonsense stories have a hard, shining edge for all their lack of sentiment." - The Toronto Star, September 2002
“What is evident in [Hungers] is Gunn's craftsmanship and control.” - Uptown, September 2002
On the Road (Oberon Press)
REVIEWS
"Deftly using the first person limited, Gunn demonstrates again her acute sensitivity to language's potentialities and weaknesses in the communication of human desire tempered by pain...Gunn has her own style marked out very distinctly and successfully."
– University of Toronto Quarterly, Fall 1992, Vol. 62, No. 1
"What Genni Gunn's terse, wry narratives have in common with Jack Kerouac's better known work of the same name is a knowledge that "the road" is not simplistically the road to freedom, but freedom itself. On The Road is a densely crafted book about love and illusion..."
– The Vancouver Sun, January 1992
"Gunn's stories have a good back beat and lively, feminist syncopation."
– The Globe & Mail, August 1991
"The calibre of Gunn's writing is exceptional." -The Windsor Star, July 1991
"...Gunn is writing polished, strong short stories.”
– The Edmonton Journal, July 1991
"On The Road is filled with forceful images and believable characters.”
– London Free Press, November 1991
© 2021 Genni Gunn