Books – Timothy Taylor

The Rule of Stephens

Author — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 18:59:08 +0000

The Rule of Stephens

"The significance of being a survivor, in the case of Air France Flight 801, for a long time lay in the simple fact that there should have been no survivors."

Catherine Bach did survive, barely suffering a scratch. She hates the word "miracle," yet it feels that way at first. She returns to life as it was before the plane went down. The biotech startup she'd built from an idea to a multi-million dollar valuation continues its meteoric rise. But then things begin to go very wrong. Glitches in tests that are meant to run smoothly, design delays, security breaches, impatient investors. Catherine has a growing sense that her good fortune is spent, that the universe might be betting against her.

And then comes the late-night call, from one of the other survivors. He has a story to tell, a warning he says, about his own troubles, a life in ruins, his luck run out. And all at the hands, he insists, of a mysterious other, resembling him perfectly right down to the features of his face.

Madness, Catherine thinks. Or she tries to think as a mystery hedge fund launches a takeover attempt, run by a woman nobody seems to know but who is said to bear an uncanny resemblance . . . to Catherine. Catherine has always believed in an ordered, rational world--more Stephen Hawking than Stephen King. But with her life at the brink, she cannot shake the feeling that her "Rule of Stephens" may no longer hold.

Writing with stinging precision about the knife-edge balance between what is known and what is believed, Timothy Taylor bridges the divide between literary fiction and page-turning thriller in this psychological tale of guilt, doubt and doppelgangers.

A Globe and Mail most anticipated book of the first half of 2018...

"Taylor has composed a tightly-crafted, suspenseful story, and one that smartly plays off the disjunction between the rational world of Stephen Hawking and the “lower and darker land” of Stephen King and related pop-culture references such as the movies Unbreakable and Final Destination. In his hands this binary translates into a conflict between the realm of science and high-stakes corporate finance and an alternative reality of supernatural doubles..."
— Alex Good, Toronto Star

Amazon.ca

Chapters Indigo

McNally Robinson

Kobo

Foodville

Author — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 18:33:55 +0000

Foodville

In this nose-to-tail culinary confessional, the acclaimed novelist behind the bestseller Stanley Park, Silent Cruise, and The Blue Light Project makes a three-course meal out of our food-obsessed culture. When and how did we all get so hyped up about food? What is driving our fixation?

Calling on Taylor’s fascination with food critic culture, his recollection of meals miserable and meals sublime, and his experimentation with cooking at the cutting edge and in the deepest recesses of the out-of-fashion, Foodville feasts its way through the dining rooms and restaurants of our era, evoking a telling, affectionate and yet critical portrait of what we really talk about when we talk about food.

Excerpt:

I FELL FOR a girl over a meal in the Top of the Horizon once, the restaurant on the 31^st floor of the Blue Horizon Hotel in downtown Vancouver. I was five years old, maybe six. Some Danish friends of my father’s were in town and they had a daughter around my age. Her name may have been Bridget, or Heidi, I don’t remember. She was this perfect doll: straw blonde, green eyes. I remember she wore a white dress with a red ribbon around her waist. The adults put us across from one another at the end of the table, so it was like we had our own little dinner date going on by the window, sipping Shirley Temples and eating those 1970s shish kebabs of skewered cubes of meat and green peppers.

The food probably wasn’t great. But the dining experience was seminal, because I think even at that age I sensed what magical things were possible with the right person and the right meal. The right view. The right rays of orange sunlight sloping off the shoulder of Stanley Park. When that little girl caught me gazing at her, she smiled back sweetly as if she’d been thinking exactly the same thing. And at the end of the evening, she gave me a blue-lacquered wooden horse that she’d brought all the way from Copenhagen.

Fast forward 20-odd years. I was newly married, and had just taken a job with the Toronto Dominion Bank in Vancouver. My wife and I had moved from Toronto, but in the weeks before we finalized our apartment, the bank put us up at… the Blue Horizon Hotel. We didn’t eat at the restaurant. These were our La Bodega years, and I’m not even sure Top of the Horizon was open at that time. But while unpacking, we came across an old scrapbook my wife had kept as a girl. And tucked into its pages was a photo of her when she was five. I hadn’t seen the picture before or any other one of her at that age. Which allowed me to discover—in a strange temporal rush, that feeling of a vortex opening and connecting you to a very particular moment and set of feelings from the past—just how firmly that long-ago meal had stayed in my subconscious. How seamlessly woven into memory it had been. Because looking at that picture of my wife, I realized that at five years of age, and right at the same time, she and Bridget/Heidi had looked exactly alike.

***

SEMINAL MEALS, FORMATIVE meals. The plates and flavors we never forget.

I’ve been poring over old menus and recipe cards from the mid-1970s, trying to push myself back in time. It’s one thing to understand how our long-ago evangelists changed the food world in unexpected, even unpredictable ways. But can we the diners and review readers push ourselves back? Can we ever really understand what came before, what food was like before the revolution hit, before we surrendered it to the tossing of fashion’s seas?

I’m suppose I’m the kind of food lover who would try. I have an obvious fondness for the old school. My heroes Barber and Pepin are guys who both published recipes for a stuffed whole head of cabbage. (You don’t see that on many menus, these days…) I always appreciated how settled they both seemed to be in their own culinary practices. Not much would change about either of them from the beginning to the end of their public cooking careers.

Amazon.ca

Chapters Indigo

Kindle

Kobo

The Blue Light Project

Author — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 18:22:03 +0000

The Blue Light Project

In a very near future that is both familiar and troubling, three lives intersect in a time of crisis.

A controversial talent show involving children is midway through taping when a man storms the television studio and takes over a hundred hostages. He’s armed with an explosive device, but expresses no motive and makes just one demand: an interview with journalist Thom Pegg.
It’s a strange request, everyone agress. A disgraced former investigative journalist, caught fabricating sources, Pegg is down on his luck and working for a lowly tabloid. Reluctant, but pressured by federal authorities, Pegg agrees to meet the hostage taker. So it is that Pegg learns why he was chosen and the horrifying truth of what the hostage taker is trying to achieve.

Crowds of people congregate near the studio, anxiously waiting along with the outside world. In the confusing perfect storm of news and rumor, two people meet and forge an immediate connection. Eve is a former Olympic gold medalist and much loved local daughter, who jogs the streets at night, running from her own past glories. Rabbit is a secretive street artist working to complete a massive street art project, which involves installatioins on the rooftops of hundreds of buildings throughout the city.

It’s a frightening time. Yet rising to its heart-stopping climax, The Blue Light Project surprises the city, and the reader, with the power of beauty and the unexpected sources of faith and light that may be found in even our darkest hours.

A National Post Most Anticipated Book of 2011…

“The Blue Light Project will haunt readers for decades to come…”
Laura Moss, editor Canadian Literature

“Timothy Taylor is without a doubt one of Canada’s finest writers.”
Steven Galloway, author of Cellist of Sarajevo

“Unforgettable. An exhilarating, at-times alarming read.”
Ayssa York, author of Effigy

Amazon.ca

Chapters Indigo

Kobo

Kindle

Stanley Park

Author — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 23:36:41 +0000

Stanley Park

Aspiring food artiste Jeremy Papier, in Timothy Taylor's debut novel, Stanley Park, attempts to juggle the finances of his fledgling eatery, The Monkey's Paw, and his conflicted feelings about his attractive sous-chef. Meanwhile, on the other side of downtown Vancouver, his anthropologist father camps out in Stanley Park to study a group of homeless men. Impending financial ruin drives Jeremy into the clutches of an evil coffee magnate while his father delves deeper into the indigent lifestyle, probing the mystery of two dead children once found in the park as well as his failed marriage to Jeremy's mother. A tragicomic denouement takes the characters back to their human roots as hunter-gatherers in the 21st century.

PRAISE FOR STANLEY PARK:

“Stanley Park is alive with the places and sights, sounds and smells, the psychic character of Vancouver. It thrums with a powerful sense of the city, urban surfaces as well as primal currents. Also food … Taylor is as good as the American novelist Jim Harrison when it comes to writing about textures and tangs, colours and sensations.” — Quill & Quire

“Stanley Park grabs an audience in a way that augurs a wide readership. [It’s] like Babette’s Feast or Chocolat. They all celebrate a meal that never was, a hope that the right meal can be turned into a Eucharist. Enjoy!” — Vancouver Sun

“[A] vibrant debut novel…Taylor is a fine prose craftsman.” — Andre Mayer, eye

“Taylor’s debut offers an inside look at the workings of a high-end restaurant, a cut-throat character in the person of a coffeehouse owner who wants to take it over and an intense sense of location, as the title suggests.” — NOW Magazine

“[Stanley Park] is a modern morality play with Jeremy Papier’s very soul at stake…Stanley Park is an assured debut that stands well above many first novels. Taylor is a writer of undeniable talent who has proven himself adept at both the long and short form, and whose wave will no doubt reach the shores.” Toronto Star

“Delicious first novel must be savoured. [This] intelligent and leisurely…novel serves up chi-chi restaurants, Blood and Crip sous chefs and exotic culinary dishes, but it is also a pointed comment on the act of creation — whether someone is working toward a soufflé, a movie, a work of art or a romp in the sack…[O]ne thing is clear: the talented Timothy Taylor…is very good at writing about food, on a par with Jim Harrison or Sara Suleri…You’ll never look the same way at a weary chef or the loaded, coded words of a menu in your hands.” Globe and Mail

“Vancouver breathes in Stanley Park, from its architecture and granola culture to its status as an American TV-show haven. It is a cosmopolitan, big city pushing to become an international, economic hub. It is also a natural wonder, with an ocean and a mountain range within spitting distance, a rainforest, and enough red tendencies to elect quite a few NDP governments. Jeremy is at once an élitist and a man of the people. Bravo to Timothy Taylor for capturing this tension so well…This is a poweful début; expect to hear a lot from him.” Edmonton Journal

“Vancouver writer Timothy Taylor takes a meat cleaver to mystery fiction by packing the novel with backroom culinary politics, a heartwarming tale about a father-son reconciliation and some moralizing on the outrage we should feel about the wastefulness of bourgeois society. What it all simmers down to is a frothy entertainment with a dash of piquancy…it is a well-calculated piece of fiction…with just the right amount of angst and social conscience.” Montreal Gazette

“A charming first novel…unflaggingly intelligent. Taylor is one of the most graceful young stylists around.” Maclean’s

“Your mouth waters as you read Timothy Taylor's first novel. Not since Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast has so lavish a table been set for a reader. If Margaret Atwood's first novel The Edible Woman put you off food, this one will put you back on it…In Stanley Park he does for the restaurant business what John le Carré does for spying; he makes it alluring. And he does for food what Patrick Suskind does for perfume; he makes it exciting…Timothy Taylor has written a novel with a plot to return to, characters to remain with, and themes to think about. The quest for authenticity, for instance, isn't an easy one, either for fictional characters or real people. His style skips along merrily...He also casually slips in some of the most mouth-watering recipes ever sprinkled on the pages of Canadian fiction.” National Post

“Extraordinarily creative . . . Taylor may be on his way to becoming the head chef of Canadian Letters.” Winnipeg Free Press

Kobo

Story House

Author — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 22:25:35 +0000

Story House

In his first novel, Stanley Park, Taylor brought readers into the inner workings of the Vancouver culinary scene, writing evocatively about everything from divine local ingredients to kitchen politics. In Story House, he takes on the rarefied world of architectural design – with some boxing, fishing and reality TV thrown in.

Graham and Elliot Gordon are half-brothers, six months apart, the only sons of Packer Gordon, a famous architect. Graham is the natural son of Packer and his wife. Elliot is the product of Packer’s dalliance with a mistress. The boys are openly hostile towards each other, always have been, and when they reach their mid-teens, Packer decides they will settle their differences in a boxing ring. He takes them to Pogey Nealon, a retired fighter who runs a gym out of the basement of his house on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. There, after eight weeks of training, the brothers box three rounds that will change their lives forever, as their father watches it all from a distance far greater than ringside: through the lens of his Bolex camera.

Some twenty-odd years later, both Pogey and Packer are dead, and it comes to light that Pogey’s house – the scene of Graham and Elliot’s pivotal battle – was likely an early design of Packer Gordon. Now deserted, the boarded-up building is home only to decades-worth of Pogey’s papers and film reels, and a slow rot that eats away at the walls. Graham is an architect himself, gaining recognition not only for his last name but his own work; he’s recently separated from his wife Esther and at a loss for how to make things work. Elliot is an importer of counterfeit brand-name products who works out of an old hotel on Hastings, and is married to a beautiful woman named Deirdre who gave up architecture to raise their young twins. The brothers’ paths have only crossed twice in the intervening years, and for both, that was twice too many.

In spite of their differences, which have only been magnified over time, Graham and Elliot agree to cooperate in restoring the house at 55 Mary Street, with enthusiastic help from the producer of the hit reality TV showUnexpected Architecture. It’s a seemingly doomed venture, but will make for great television. And as the plans for preserving Packer Gordon’s legacy begin to come together, there’s not only a surprising amount of collaboration, but cautious optimism that they might just pull it off. Yet nobody is prepared for what actually takes place when the cameras roll.

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR STORY HOUSE:

“Cities reflect the souls of their inhabitants, and nothing lays claim to the soul of a city more than a novel that uses it as a character…. Timothy Taylor does it right…. [He] knows Vancouver’s arteries and bones. His portraits of that spectacular city … are as complex and well-rounded as a Tolstoy character.”
—Calgary Herald

"Taylor’s very good at conjuring vivid visuals, a talent played out in spades in the novel’s tragic final act. . . . Story House is a big, brainy novel. An ambitious project. . . . Taylor’s book [is] intelligently and solidly built."
—The Globe and Mail

“Taylor has a knack for imbuing his stories with lyric realism, unearthing beauty in the mundane and trivial…. Story House is never less than eminently readable.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

"Taylor is a master of the dramatic in medas res and abrupt transition. . . .tour de force writing. . . . Taylor harrows the house of the dead in gripping fashion; he deserves all his accolades, and then some."
—National Post

"Story House reveals all of Taylor's hallmarks and strengths. No one writes about work with such attention to the minutiae. It's not merely getting the facts; Taylor enters the language and customs of distinct societies and reveals them with astonishing verisimilitude. He immerses readers in alien worlds. . . . Story House is a thrilling tour de force, a most impressive achievement of idea and implementation, of structure in service of function. It's architectural, really. And Timothy Taylor is one of very few writers who could have made it work so well."
—Ottawa Citizen

Kobo

Silent Cruise and Other Stories

Author — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 21:11:47 +0000

Silent Cruise and Other Stories

Silent Cruise, Timothy Taylor's first collection of short fiction, is a long, lush series of stories that will delight fans of his enormously successful debut novel, Stanley Park. Several of these strangely original stories are obliquely connected with each other (either through strange thematic turns or common characters), and they share with the novel a setting in western Canada and an interest in food.

Taylor begins with "Doves of Townsend," a piece about an antique buyer whose fetishization of beautiful made things is challenged by a calculated brush with the real world--in the form of a collection of butterflies found scattered across a table at a flea market. The author then moves into even more eclectic territory: in "The Resurrection Plant" an ostracized Jewish high school student in Edmonton shares a locker with a teenage tough who insists on displaying a Nazi flag; while in "The Boar's Head Easter" a Vancouver cook travels to Chicago to meet his mother's mysterious old flame, nursing a half-spoken passion for his best friend's girlfriend all the while. The novella that concludes the collection, "NewStart 2.0TM," traces two artists from rural Saskatchewan through their truly bizarre lives to a confrontation in Rome, raising old questions about artistic production in a strange and unusual fashion. ...deft, melancholic, and utterly wonderful.

--Jack Illingworth

“Silent Cruise, Timothy Taylor's first collection of short fiction, is a long, lush series of stories that will delight fans of his enormously successful debut novel, Stanley Park…deft, melancholic, and utterly wonderful.Amazon

“Taylor's graceful touch and keen eye leave one eager for his next book.” Book List

“There can be little doubt that Taylor is one of Canada’s best short-story writers…. Taylor rises to the challenge Northrop Frye set for the poet: he shows us the world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.” -- Quill & Quire, March 2002

“The stories collected in Silent Cruise crackle with intellectual energy and symbols and feature an impressive range of characters in up-to-the-moment settings.” -- Quill & Quire, Best Books of 2002, February 2003

“Silent Cruise…demonstrates Taylor’s diversity of subject and ease with language…. If you’ve already read all eight stories in the various literary journals, then you may think it’s not worth buying the collection. Wrong. The book is worth it simply for the novella, “Newstart 2.0 ”…. Silent Cruise is a chunky collection, packed with dense and complicated stories. Flaws are minimal, and they are the result of trying something big. The rarified narrative level that Taylor inhabits is a delight to explore in this collection.” -- Monday Magazine, May 2002

“An intriguing collection of short fiction [from] a master stylist…. Taylor’s use of language is exact. He has a gift for choosing exactly the right word to express an idea or an emotion, giving his writing a feeling of strength and precision. Each character rings true, enabling the reader to become engrossed in the stories. Silent Cruise is excellent writing and enjoyably hypnotic.” -- Hamilton Spectator, May 2002

“Seeking solace, people turn to self-help gurus and superficial notions of God. Some of us, though, have discovered something akin to hope and meaning via art and intellect…. Silent Cruise. It’s a good thing for those of us who appreciate well-crafted, perfectly pitched, intellectually mature, quietly poetic, and frequently funny stories that Timothy Taylor … came to his sense and quit his day job to write…. Taylor writes with the wonder and joy of a kid who has had his nose pressed to the candy-store window and all of a sudden finds himself inside, with one cautious eye glancing back over his shoulder.” -- The Georgia Straight, May 2002

“Intelligen[t] and rich…. A work of baroque elegance and inventiveness … Timothy Taylor [is] a writer to seek and savour.” -- Annabel Lyon, National Post

" ... few demonstrate the density, intellectual range and originality that Timothy Taylor does in Silent Cruise.... sharply honed brilliance.... Overarching questions of consumption and pleasure, loss and hunger, marble these stories with intricate flavour.... Demanding and complex, the passions unveiled in these explorations are inescapable. Timothy Taylor is the only writer ever to have three stories published in The Journey Prize Anthology in one year. It is easy to understand why. This is a dazzling collection.” -- Aritha van Herk, The Ottawa Citizen, May 2002

“… Timothy Taylor is a gifted writer who successfully catches the neurotic (and creative) zeitgeist of our times…. both amusing and thought provoking…. In Silent Cruise, Taylor treads the subtle border territory separating outright parody from the strange truths and beauty of our time¯this is a fine collection, and Timothy Taylor is a major talent who continues to make his mark on the Canadaina literary scene.” -- Times Colonist, May 2002

Kobo

The Cranky Connoisseur

Author — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 21:03:01 +0000

The Cranky Connoisseur

Everyone is a foodie now. But in a world of foodies, refinement and rarified good taste seem increasingly to come at the cost of actually being satisfied with anything. How do we crack the dilemma of contentment when we're constantly accumulating expertise about how things can be improved? The Cranky Connoisseur takes us on a tasty and entertaining tour through London, Las Vegas, and the remote British Columbian bush, en route to its surprising answer.

Kobo