Sentimental Exorcisms

By David Derry

A former lover becomes an uninvited houseguest in Ted and Marjory’s quiet abode, adversely affecting investigations into the history of the semicolon. A judge must compulsively narrate his neighbour into ignominy. A market analyst’s visit to a stripper goes awry, leading to a compulsory leave from work and an intervention from loved ones. An English lit undergraduate finds himself besieged by increasingly urgent voyeuristic desires, and soon finds himself pressed to the glass, firm in his belief that the only way to exorcise his demon is to identify its essential objectives and achieve them. Meanwhile, poor Tim Pine must face his coprophobia in a most public and lamentable office misadventure.

Sentimental Exorcisms is a collection of tragicomic satire, latter-day Victorian collisions of Nabokov and Proust. The men in these long short stories have grand designs and petty fears, or modest designs and grand fears. Desires, scapegoats, idylls and obtrusive egos: the golden calves they can’t quite bear to kill. With their ramparts crumbling around them, each mounts an exuberant defence in a vacuum of self-absorption.

'Derry specializes in the most delightfully self-unaware characters. These are delicious portrayals of delusion.' – Uptown

'Derry's cohort of misanthropic, sexual-repressed anti-heroes possesses a spooky ability to get under your skin.' – Prairie Fire

'Arrestingly witty.' – Vue Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: Jan 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781770562486

David Derry

David Derry lives in Toronto. Having been seduced by farming, boat-building, and chauffeuring, and having flirted with academia, he more recently discovered the insular pleasure of drafting and amending contracts, where we find him today, working as a legal assistant. Sentimental Exorcisms is his first book.

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