Winner of the 2009 British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, short-listed for the 2008 Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize Thousands of boys dream of becoming firefighters. Some get the chance, and for some of those, the dream becomes a nightmare.Burning Down the House is the story of Wangersky's eight-year career as a volunteer firefighter, an experience that wound up reaching into every facet of his life and changed the way he saw the world forever. Written in vibrant, luminous prose, the book traces his years from rookie to veteran firefighter and the toll it took on his personal life. Offering a rare glimpse into physical dangers and psychological costs of trying to save strangers' lives, Wangersky paints a harrowing and sometimes heartbreakingly vivid portrait of the fires, medical calls, and automobile accidents that are the standard fare of the profession. Visceral and affecting, Burning Down the House is an insightful insider's account of the perilous world of firefighting and an unforgettable memoir of how, in finding his passion, Wangersky lost himself.

Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself

Biographies & Memoirs

Wangersky, Russell

Professionals & Academics

Thomas Allen Publishers

Winner of the 2009 British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, short-listed for the 2008 Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize Thousands of boys dream of becoming firefighters. Some get the chance, and for some of those, the dream becomes a nightmare.Burning Down the House is the story of Wangersky's eight-year career as a volunteer firefighter, an experience that wound up reaching into every facet of his life and changed the way he saw the world forever. Written in vibrant, luminous prose, the book traces his years from rookie to veteran firefighter and the toll it took on his personal life. Offering a rare glimpse into physical dangers and psychological costs of trying to save strangers' lives, Wangersky paints a harrowing and sometimes heartbreakingly vivid portrait of the fires, medical calls, and automobile accidents that are the standard fare of the profession. Visceral and affecting, Burning Down the House is an insightful insider's account of the perilous world of firefighting and an unforgettable memoir of how, in finding his passion, Wangersky lost himself.

Burning down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself

Memoirs

When retiree Keith O'Reilly witnesses the murder of his neighbour by a pizza delivery man one night during a snowstorm, a unique series of stories begins to unfold. As the narrative seamlessly moves from neighbour to neighbour, house to house, the reader begins to understand, not only the circumstances that led to the murder, but the private secrets and personal struggles of many of the McKay Street residents. Travelling through the changing viewpoints of a more than a dozen of people in a small residential neighbourhood in St. John's, Newfoundland, The Glass Harmonica looks at the way common memories and shared experiences bend and warp as individuals recall the events of their lives, and how these distortions influence both the character's and the reader's understanding of the truth.

The Glass Harmonica

Wagersky, Russell

Literature & Fiction

Thomas Allen & Son

Shortlisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2012 BMO Winterset Award From critically acclaimed and award-winning writer, Russell Wangersky, comes a new collection of short fiction. Everyone has something they’re good at: one particular personal skill that they use to keep their lives moving forward when their worlds suddenly become difficult or near-impossible. For some, it’s denial; for others, blunt pragmatism. Still others depend on an over-inflated view of self to keep criticism and doubt at bay. In his new short story collection, Whirl Away, Russell Wangersky—author of critically-acclaimed fiction and non-fiction including The Glass Harmonica, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself and The Hour of Bad Decisions— looks at what happens when people’s personal coping skills go awry. These are people who discover their anchor-chain has broken: characters safe in the world of self-deception or even selfdelusion, forced to face the fact that their main line of defense has become their greatest weakness. From the caretaker of a prairie amusement park to the lone occupant of a collapsing Newfoundland town, from a travelling sports drink marketer with a pressing need to get off the road to an elevator inspector who finds himself losing his marriage while sensuously burying himself in the tastes and smells of the kitchen, these are people who spin wildly out of control, finding themselves in a new and different world.

Whirl Away

As entertaining as they are insightful, the stories in The Path of Most Resistance are anchored by the concept of passive aggression in our everyday lives: ordinary people who are quietly, desperately, and indirectly trying to impose their will on the uncaring world around them.From a woman who compulsively shops for luggage in order to sublimate her desire for a divorce to a senior citizen who tries to force his family to visit by refusing to eat, the characters in this collection try to change their lives through oblique resistance. The stories also humorously show readers how passive aggression is perhaps at its most effective when carried out in smaller, more insidious ways. Uncertain about the state of his relationship, a man obsesses, but refuses to clean, a spot of mould in the bathroom.The Path of Most Resistance is an observant and compassionate look at the feelings of powerlessness that we all share, and will have readers silently cringing and nodding in recognition of their own bad behaviour.

The Path of Most Resistance

Humor & Satire

Astoria

This first short fiction collection by a prominent Canadian journalist paints vivid word pictures of the world and these canvasses superimposes people in all their human imperfections. Russell Wangersky's characters, caught in a variety of human circumstances, make some outstandingly bad decisions. A labourer enjoys new-found popularity among his co-workers after losing several fingers in a work accident. So, in the face of returning invisibility, he makes a desperate decision. An elderly shut-in chooses to believe the lies of her own life and the world view she absorbs from talk radio and finds the scapegoats that both those distortions of reality require. A man on an ill-conceived vacation decides to stay in a hot tub all day and all night, rather than face his disintegrating family. In these stories, some people seem to escape the consequences of their bad decisions, some people wind up being redeemed, and some are left to fates the reader can only imagine. As a backdrop, often a counterpoint, to these very human struggles, Wangersky paints the most exquisite canvasses with his words. Whether it be landscape or seascape of his long-time home in Newfoundland, startling weather, fine woodworking, or the workings of a factory, he presents us with note-perfect descriptions of the often-stunning world in which we imperfect humans live. Wangersky reminds us, even bad decisions can be cause for celebration, of what it means to be human.

The Hour of Bad Decisions

Contemporary

Coteau Books

Same Ground: Chasing Family Down the California Gold Rush Trail

Historical

ECW Press

From author Russell Wangersky, comes a dark, psychological thriller about a man named Walt, a grocery store cleaner who collects the shopping lists people leave in the store and discard without thought. In his fifties, abandoned, he says, by his now-missing wife Mary, Walt is pursued by police detectives unsatisfied with the answers he's given about her disappearance. Almost invisible to the people who pass him every day, the grocery lists he collects, written on everything from cancelled cheques to mortgage statements to office stationary, give him a personal hold over those who both ignore him and unwittingly disclose facets of their lives to him. When a new cold case squad is formed in St. John's to look into Mary's disappearance, the detectives begin to realize that Walt may be involved in more than just his wife's disappearance. Set in modern-day Newfoundland, and told from the perspectives of the killer, the victim and the police, after reading Walt, you'll be sure to never let your shopping list fall to the floor ever again.

Walt

Genre Fiction

Spiderline

When retiree Keith O'Reilly witnesses the murder of his neighbour by a pizza delivery man one night during a snowstorm, a unique series of stories begins to unfold. As the narrative seamlessly moves from neighbour to neighbour, house to house, the reader begins to understand, not only the circumstances that led to the murder, but the private secrets and personal struggles of many of the McKay Street residents. Travelling through the changing viewpoints of a more than a dozen of people in a small residential neighbourhood in St. John's, Newfoundland, The Glass Harmonica looks at the way commonmemories and shared experiences bend and warp as individuals recall the events of their lives, and how these distortions influence both the character's and the reader's understanding of the truth.

The Glass Harmonica: A Novel

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Books by Wangersky, Russell