The Withdrawal Method

Pasha Malla! This is YOUR life! At the launch of his debut short fiction collection, The Withdrawal Method, Malla will have a revealing on-stage conversation with Globe & Mail editor, music critic, and author Carl Wilson about the path of a writer, from a boy obsessed with Stephen King to one of the McSweeney’s tribe. The evening will begin with performances by regular contributors to the highly popular series, Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids. — A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, House Of Anansi Press and EYE WEEKLY.

The Withdrawal Method is a remarkably assured, mature and technically accomplished collection from one of Canada’s most promising young writers, Pasha Malla. Many of Malla’s characters are young men, urbanites with diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The stories explore male relationships – those that men have with women, children, family, social expectations, and one another. By and large, the characters are recognizable and their predicaments are not unusual. Importantly, however, Malla skillfully makes such familiar landmarks problematic by introducing representations of masculinity that go far beyond the clichéd or expected. The Withdrawal Method heralds a refreshing voice on the literary scene.

Pasha Malla is a writer whose work has appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, including two appearances in Journey Prize Stories, a "Notable Story" in Best American Nonrequired Reading, the forthcoming Toronto Noir anthology and, most recently, GreenTOpia. He is the founder of Now Hear This!, a writers-in-schools program run through Descant magazine, and has edited an all-Canadian edition of Hobart that includes David Bergen, Mark Jarman, Sheila Heti and Lee Henderson. Snare Books (Montreal) will publish All our grandfathers are ghosts, a collection of his poems, in 2008. Malla lives in Toronto.

Carl Wilson is an editor and critic at The Globe & Mail, and his work also has appeared in Pitchfork, Slate, The New York Times, Blender and many other publications. He runs the influential music blog Zoilus.com and is part of the team behind the popular non-idiomatic lecture series, Trampoline Hall. Wilson recently released his first book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, to popular and critical acclaim.