Susan Glickman

  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • Poetry
    • On Finding a Copy of Pigeon in the Hospital Bookstore
    • Poem about your laugh
    • Punish your book
    • Summertime
  • Fiction
    • Background
    • Extract from The Violin Lover
  • Nonfiction
    • Klibansky Award Speech
  • Children’s Books
  • A Note on Teaching Poetry
  • Other Writing
    • Angels, Not Polarities
    • Dictionnaire des idées reçues
    • Found Money
    • Maiden or Crone
    • My Life with Northrop Frye
    • Obituary for Zitner
    • On the Line
    • Second Person Impersonal
    • The Better Mother
    • The Violin in History
  • Editing
  • News
  • Teaching
    • Novel Writing, Level I (CWWR 420)
    • Novel Writing, Level II (CWWR 421)
    • Poetry: Rapping, Reading, Revising (CWWR 430)
    • Creative Writing Through Reading: University of Toronto SCS 1695
  • Bio
    • Stuff about me floating around the web
  • Cartoons

Kind words on Goodreads

Kind words on Goodreads

05 Jan 2016 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

This engaging page-turner kept me surprised and entertained during a flight delay – what better recommendation is there? Seriously, whether or not you’re a mystery fan, Safe As Houses is a great read anywhere. It has so many pleasing components — Liz, a bookish dog-walker turned sleuth when her hound sniffs out a dead body in one of Toronto’s most genteel parks; Sammy, her fractious teenaged kid who can’t cope with her boring mom; Maxime, an elegant French Classics professor and Roman-antiquity quote-dropper. And more. There’s a subplot; Liz’s marriage to Adam is over, and he lives upstairs with his girlfriend in the building that houses her bookstore. He wants out of his investment, provoking enough uncertainty in Liz’s life without a dead body showing up on her morning walk.

The parallel storytelling is very well done and builds suspense. At the outset, we’re introduced to an abused child, a box of matches, an act of arson. His story (noted by a matchbox icon) is interspersed with the numbered chapters of Liz’s narrative, as we gradually realize who the child is and why it matters. In the end, the mystery gets solved, but there’s no tidy ending; it feels both as satisfying and as shadowy as life often feels. In its gentle way, the story keeps reminding us that safety is never certain and life keeps surprising us, even on innocent dog-walks. You’ll enjoy this book.

– Carole Giangrande

I updated my blog on Goodreads

28 Dec 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/287052.Susan_Glickman/blog

Great review of Safe as Houses in the Globe and Mail!

18 Nov 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

“It’s great to read a book set in Toronto and Susan Glickman, poet, editor, critic and creative writing professor, does it proud in this debut mystery set in the lovely hidden enclave of Wychwood Park. The story begins with bookstore owner Liz Ryerson walking her dog in the park. Dog smells something, goes to hunt, scratches up a body. Suddenly, we are in whodunit land, with a totally familiar setting which Glickman sketches like a master. Reading along, I was reminded often of the late great Eric Wright’s wonderful cop novels and Jack Batten’s PI stories, both located in Toronto neighbourhoods with people anyone might recognize as types. All that said, the mystery is a good one, with a nice puzzle and a deft, smart woman to sort out the clues. It’s short and fun and well-written and perfect for a rainy afternoon at home. Let’s hope Liz Ryerson returns soon.”

  • Margaret Cannon, The Globe & Mail, Saturday November 14, 2015

Mark Abley uses Safe as Houses to highlight a point about dialogue (Montreal Gazette, Nov.7, 2015)

07 Nov 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

IMG_9587 (1)

an article about Safe as Houses

27 Oct 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

click on the link:

data.axmag.com

DATA.AXMAG.COM

Blog post about Safe as Houses

27 Oct 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

https://deborahserravalle.wordpress.com/tag/susan-glickman/

BOOK REVIEW: SAFE AS HOUSES BY SUSAN GLICKMAN

Safe_As_Houses_Glickman

A Brief Synopsis

While walking in her dog, Jasper, in Toronto’s Hillcrest Village, indie book store owner, Liz Ryerson, stumbles upon a corpse. Liz soon discovers the murdered man is, James Scott, a realtor who recently gave her an appraisal on the building she co-owns with her playboy ex-husband, Adam.

Liz’s complex but predictable life is suddenly in upheaval: Adam is leaving on an extended trip with his beautiful, young lover, Laura; her daughter, Samantha, has taken up with a “bad boy” and is exhibiting alarming signs of anorexia; and her son, Josh, is off doing his own thing. To complicate matters further, Adam is pressuring Liz to sell the property which also houses her book store, Inside of a Dog. Amidst this chaos, Liz abetted by her eccentric new friend, widowed retired classics professor, Maxime Bertrand, embarks on a quest to solve the murder of James Scott.

My Comments

In her recent novel,  Safe as Houses, Susan Glickman offers a convincing portrayal of a woman attempting to exert control over her world gone mad. Twists, turns and diversions in the story propel it forward at a satisfying pace. Liz is a likeable character and her relationship with Max is endearing but plausible. For book lovers, Liz’s store, Inside of a Dog, is a charming character unto itself. Still, the story has a dark side and it is in this underbelly, Safe as Houses, sets itself apart from your predictable, amateur sleuthing story.

Ms Glickman choses to unravel the underlying events in an unexpected and well-considered format: interspersed chapters are skillfully told from the point-of-view of the victim. In this way, Liz’s story and the victim’s unfold in tandem to a satisfying conclusion.

My Final Word

Safe as Houses is a well-paced mystery having all the usual “suspects” one expects in that genre. The twist is in the telling. And that, in my opinion, is what sets this book apart from other mysteries on my shelf.

Nice mention of Safe as Houses in a column about books about bookshops!

01 Oct 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

 

Safe As Houses, by Susan Glickman

What is it about bookshops and murder? Glickman’s new novel is a cozy murder mystery about how lives are transformed after the discovery of a body in Toronto’s tony Wychwood Park neighbourhood.

But one of the most delicious parts of the book is the setting: a bookshop owned by Glickman’s protagonist, Liz Ryerson, near Bathurst and St. Clair in downtown Toronto. The shop is called “Outside of a Dog,” from the quote by Harpo Marx (“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend“) and also because there is indeed a dog (with whom Liz is out walking when she stumbles across the corpse). And the reader is able to vicariously experience the joy Liz takes in working in her shop. She spends time thoughtfully curating her collection and assembling themed tables, and reading the lists of books within the text was so much fun and an absolute bookish pleasure.

 

Kerry Clare, http://49thshelf.com/Blog/2015/10/01/Books-About-Bookshops

Safe as Houses now available.

28 Jul 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

safe as houses

 

 

Book launch

Wednesday September 9th, 7-9 pm

at TYPE BOOKS, 883 Queen Street West, Toronto

 

From the CBC CANADA WRITES website

19 Jul 2015 / 0 Comments / in The Blog/by Susan Glickman

Susan Glickman: How I Wrote Safe as Houses

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadawrites/2015/05/susan-glickman-how-i-wrote-safe-as-houses.html

On May 22, 2015 7:05 AM

In most mystery novels, the person who finds the body falls off the radar as soon as the police arrive. But not in Susan Glickman’s Safe as Houses. For her first mystery, Glickman wanted to explore how it would feel for someone to find a dead body in the place they go for their daily dose of tranquillity. 
 
We spoke to Susan Glickman about how she wrote Safe As Houses, from the inspiration of her dog Toby to finding her setting, literally, in her own backyard.
Safe_As_Houses_Glickman.jpg
IMPENDING DOOM
The idea for Safe as Houses came from walking my dog around my neighbourhood. He took off on me in this beautiful enclave in Toronto called Wychwood Park, which has a private tennis court and a beautiful duck pond and is surrounded by elegant Arts and Crafts houses. For some bizarre reason, I thought of my dog finding a dead body in the bushes. This wasn’t prompted by any evil associations with the neighbourhood. It just has to do with my own sense of impending doom and having read too many murder mysteries.
DEADLY PROFESSION
Wychwood Park is a beautiful neighbourhood. You can’t imagine anything more bucolic. There are giant oak trees and naturalized lawns full of bluebells and daffodils. It looks like a little piece of England. The phrase “safe as houses” came into my mind. It’s an old English expression. I thought it had to do with one’s feeling of safety when in a solid structure like a house, but actually it has to do with real estate being the least volatile of investments. When I investigated this saying I decided the dead man had to be a real estate agent.
NEW YORKER
Maxime Bertrand is Liz Ryerson’s sidekick. He is a retired classics professor, originally from Montreal, who is lovingly based on an old friend of mine who I miss very much. He was a retired English professor and my doctoral dissertation supervisor. People who knew Sheldon Zitner might recognize him a bit in Maxime—although Maxime is much less acerbic than my friend, who was a New Yorker and had a very wry sense of humour… It’s not so much him as a character, but it’s the relationship that Maxime has with Liz. They have an almost father/daughter relationship.
toby at desk again.JPG
FOR THE LOVE OF TOBY
One of the things that happens when you write fiction is you get to fill in missing pieces of your own life. I love my neighbourhood, but we don’t have a bookstore. So I made my protagonist, Liz Ryerson, own the store that I wish existed in my neighbourhood… I also made her dog a cross between a border collie and a lab—other than that, he has all the qualities of my own little dog Toby, who’s small and can’t fetch a Frisbee. So I decided if I was going to give myself a bookstore I was also going to give my dog the body he wanted so he could catch a Frisbee.

I have added a new page about editing.

17 May 2015 / 0 Comments / in Uncategorized/by Susan Glickman

If you wish to inquire about an editing job, please go to that page first.

Page 4 of 7«‹23456›»

Awards & Prizes

The Violin Lover, Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2006.


WINNER 2006 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction!


The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen's University Press, 1998.


WINNER 1999 Gabrielle Roy Prize Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures


WINNER 2000 Raymond Klibansky Book Prize Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada For a transcript of the Klibansky acceptance speech -- please click HERE

Recent Comments

  • Susan Glickman on Beautiful cover by David Drummond for my new book of poetry, due out April 2019.
  • Eva Bednar on Beautiful cover by David Drummond for my new book of poetry, due out April 2019.

Archives

  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • March 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • July 2015
  • May 2015
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • July 2013
  • April 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012

Recent Posts

  • West Coast Tour
  • Something I wrote for Susan Gillis’ blog, Concrete and River
  • Video of a recent poetry reading
  • Second online mini interview about poetry.
  • First of a Series of Mini Interviews about poetry available on line

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

Categories

  • Books
  • Reviews
  • The Blog
  • Uncategorized

Recent Comments

  • Susan Glickman on Beautiful cover by David Drummond for my new book of poetry, due out April 2019.
  • Eva Bednar on Beautiful cover by David Drummond for my new book of poetry, due out April 2019.

Recent Posts

  • West Coast Tour
  • Something I wrote for Susan Gillis’ blog, Concrete and River

Archives

  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • March 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • July 2015
  • May 2015
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • July 2013
  • April 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
© Copyright - Susan Glickman - Wordpress Theme by Kriesi.at
  • scroll to top
  • Send us Mail
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed